his trail!" he was
exonerating himself.

When Maurice retreated, looking like a schoolboy, it took him
a perceptible time to regain his sense of age and pride and
responsibility. He rushed back to the hotel--where he had plunged into
the extravagance of the "bridal suite,"--to pour out his hurt feelings
to Eleanor, and while she looked at him in one of her lovely silences he
railed at Bradley, and said the trouble with him was that he was sore
about money! "He needn't worry! I'll pay him," Maurice said, largely.
And then forgot Bradley in the rapture of kissing Eleanor's hand. "As
if we cared for his opinion!" he said.

"We don't care!" she said, joyously. Her misgivings had vanished like
dew in the hot sun. Old Mrs. O'Brien had done her part in dissipating
them. While Maurice was bearding his tutor, Eleanor had gone across
town to her laundress's, to ask if Mrs. O'Brien would take Bingo as a
boarder--. "I can't have him at the hotel," she explained, and then
told the great news:--"I'm going to live there, because I--I'm
married,"--upon which she was kissed, and blessed, and wept over! "The
gentleman is a little younger than I am," she confessed, smiling; and
Mrs. O'Brien said:

"An' what difference does that make? He'll only be lovin' ye hotter than
an old fellow with the life all gone out o' him!"

Eleanor said, laughing, "Yes, that's true!" and cuddled the baby
grandson's head against her breast.

"You'll be happy as a queen!" said Mrs. O'Brien; and "in a year from
now you'll have something better to take care of than Bingo--_he'll_ be
jealous!"

But she hardly heeded Mrs. O'Brien and her joyful prophecy of Bingo's
approaching jealousy; having taken the dive, she had risen into the
light and air, and now she forgot the questioning depths! She was on the
crest of contented achievement. She even laughed to think that she had
ever hesitated about marrying Maurice. Absurd! As if the few years
between them were of the slightest consequence! Mrs. O'Brien was
right.... So she smoothed over Maurice's first bad moment with an
indifference as to Mr. Bradley's opinion which was most reassuring to
him. (Yet once in a while she thought of Mr. Houghton, and bit her lip.)

The next bad moment neither she nor Maurice could dismiss so easily; it
came in the interview with her astounded aunt, whose chief concern (when
she read the letter which Eleanor had left on her pincushion) was lest
the Houghtons would think she had inv