back yard—­“Garden, if you please!” Maurice announced—­for Bingo’s bones.  Clumps of Madonna lilies had bloomed here, and died, and bloomed again, for almost a century; the yard was shaded by a silver poplar, which would gray and whiten in the wind in hot weather, or delicately etch itself against a wintry sky.  A little path, with moss between the bricks and always damp in the shadow of the poplar, led from the basement door to an iron gate; through its rusty bars one could see, a block away, the slipping gleam of the river, hurrying down from “their meadow,” to disappear under the bridge.  Maurice said he would build a seat around the poplar, “... and we’ll put a table under it, and paint it green, and have tea there in the afternoon!  Skeezics will like that.”

“Edith looks healthy,” said Mrs. Newbolt; “my dear father used to say he liked healthy females.  Old-fashioned word—­females.  Well, I’m afraid dear father liked ’em too much.  But my dear mother—­she was a Dennison—­pretended not to see it.  She had sense.  Great thing in married life, to have sense, and know what not to see!  Pity Edith’s not musical.  Have you a cook?  I believe she’d have caught you, Maurice, if Eleanor hadn’t got in ahead!  I brought a chocolate drop for Bingo.  Here, Bingo!”

Bingo, silky and snarly, climbed on to her steeply sloping black-satin lap, ate the chocolate drop—­keeping all the while a liquid and adoring eye upon his mistress—­then slid down and ran to curl up on Eleanor’s skirt.

By September the moving and seat building were accomplished—­the last not entirely on Edith’s account; it was part of Maurice’s painstaking desire to do something—­anything!—­for “poor Eleanor,” as he named her in his remorseful thought.  There was never a day—­indeed, there was not often an hour!—­when his own meanness to his wife (combined with disgust at being a liar) did not ache somewhere in the back of his mind.  So he tried, in all sorts of anxious ways, to please her.  He almost never saw Lily; but the thought of her often brought Eleanor a box of candy or a bunch of violets.  Such expenditures were slightly easier for him now, because he had had another small raise,—­which this time he had told Eleanor about.  On the strength of it he said to himself that he supposed he ought to give Lily a little something extra?  So on the day when Mrs. Houghton and Edith were to arrive in Mercer, he went out to Medfield to tell Jacky’s mother that she might count on a few dollars more each month.  The last time he had seen her, Lily had told him that Jacky “was fussing with his teeth something fierce.  I had to hire a little girl from across the street,” she said, “to take him out in the perambulator, or else I couldn’t ’tend to my cooking.  It costs money to live, Mr. Curtis,” Lily had said, “and eggs are going up, awful!” She had never gone back to the familiarity of those days when she called him “Curt.”  That he, dull and preoccupied, still called her Lily gave her, somehow, such a respectful consciousness of his superiority that she had hesitated to speak of anything so intimate as eggs...  “Yes, I must give her something extra,” Maurice thought, remembering the “cost” of living.  “Talk about paying the piper!  I bet I’m paying him, all right!”