, with her car fare and her
handkerchief; Edith, with her impudent "advice" to Maurice not to have
secrets from his wife--pitied her! She would not be pitied by them!

"Don't touch me!" she said, furiously; "_you love my husband_."

Edith heard her own blood pounding in her ears.

"Don't you?" said Eleanor; her face was furrowed with pain; "Don't you?"

It was a moment of naked truth. "I have loved Maurice," Edith said,
steadily, "ever since I was a child. I always shall. I would like to
love you, too, Eleanor, if you would let me. But nothing--_nothing_!
shall ever break up my ... affection for Maurice."

"You might as well call it love."

Edith, rising, said, very low: "Well, I will call it love. I am not
ashamed. I am not wronging you. You have no need to be jealous of me,
Eleanor. He cares nothing for me."

Eleanor struck the table with her clenched fists. "You shall never have
him!" she said.

Edith turned, silently, and went up the veranda stairs and out of the
house.

CHAPTER XXXIII

When Eleanor got her breath, after that crazy outbreak, she rushed up to
her own room, bolted the door, fell on her knees at her bedside, and
told herself in frantic gasps, that she would _fight_ Edith Houghton!
Grapple with her! Beat her away from Maurice! "I must _do_ something--do
something--"

But what? There was only one weapon with which she could vanquish
Edith--Maurice's love for his son. _Jacky!_ She must have Jacky ...

But how could she get him?

She knew she couldn't get him with Lily's consent. Frantic with jealousy
as she was, she recognized that! Yet, over and over, during the week
that followed that hour in the garden with Edith, she said to herself,
"If Maurice had Jacky, Edith would be nothing to him." ... It was at
this point that one day something made her add, "_Suppose he had Lily,
too?_" Then he could have Jacky.

"If I were dead, he could marry Lily."

At first this was just one of those vague thoughts that blew through her
mind, as straws and dead leaves blow down a dreary street. But this
straw caught, so to speak, and more straws gathered and heaped about it.
The idea lodged, and another idea lodged with it: If, to get his child,
he married Jacky's mother, Edith would never reach him! And if, by
dying, Eleanor gave Maurice his child, he would always love her for her
gift; she would always be "wonderful." And Edith? Why, he couldn't, he
_couldn't_--if his wife died to give him Jack