Walter Raleigh business. Remember how she was always sort of dotty
on Sir Walter Raleigh? An ideal, don't you know"; Johnny rambled on:
"Girls are that way. Only Edith's the kind that sticks to things."

"'Try, try again,'" said Maurice, mechanically; but his blood suddenly
pounded in his ears.

"I'm going to," Johnny said, calmly; and began to talk South America.
Indeed, he talked so long that Maurice, catching sight of the clock,
exclaimed that he would have to run!

"Johnny, get Eleanor on the wire, will you; at Mrs. Newbolt's, and tell
her I'd have called her up, but I got delayed, and had to leg it to
catch the train? Or maybe you wouldn't mind going round there, and
walking home with her?"

"Glad to," said Johnny.

When Maurice, swinging on to the last platform of the last Pullman, was
able to sit down in his section, he was absorbed in Johnny Bennett's
affairs. "What did he mean by saying that? Did he mean--" Johnny's
enigmatical words rang in his ears; "I said to 'try again; nobody was
cutting him out.' And he said 'She has some kind of an ideal up her
sleeve.' ... 'A Sir Walter Raleigh business' ..."

Johnny Bennett, walking toward Mrs. Newbolt's, was also thinking, in his
calm way, of just what he had said there by Maurice's fireside. "Of
course he doesn't see why she hasn't fallen in love with anybody else.
Any decent fellow would be stupid about that sort of thing. But it's
been that way ever since she was a child. And I've loved her ever since
then, too. All the same, I'll only sign up for a year. Then I'll make
another stab at it ..."

When he rang Mrs. Newbolt's doorbell, and was told that Eleanor had not
been there, he was perplexed. "I must have misunderstood Maurice," he
thought.

CHAPTER XXXI

Eleanor had no intention of going to Mrs. Newbolt's. "She'd talk Edith
to me!" she said to herself; "I _can't_ understand why she likes her!"
Instead of dining with her aunt, she meant to walk about the streets
until she was sure that Maurice had started for the train; then she
would go back to her own house. So she wandered down the avenue until,
tired of looking with unseeing eyes into shop windows, it occurred to
her to go into the park; there, on a bench on one of the unfrequented
paths, she sat down, hoping that no one would recognize her; it was
cold, and she shivered and looked at her watch. Only six o'clock! It
would be two hours before Maurice would leave the house for the station.
I