“She’s a dose,” said Johnny.

“Yes,” Edith agreed; “she’s stupid.  But I’m going to pull off a picnic, some Sunday, to cheer her up.  ’Course you needn’t come, if you don’t want to.”

Johnny, looking properly bored, said, briefly, “I don’t mind.”

This was in mid-September.  “Are you game for it, Eleanor?” Edith said one night at dinner; “we can find some pleasant place by the river—­”

“I know a bully place,” Maurice said, “in the Medfield meadows; remember, Eleanor?  We went there on our trolley wedding trip,” he informed Edith.

Eleanor, struggling between the pleasure of Maurice’s “remember,” and antagonism at sharing that sacred remembering with Edith, objected; “It may rain.”

“Oh, come on,” Edith rallied her:  “be a sport!  It won’t kill you if it does rain!”

But Maurice, after his impulsive recollection of the “bully place,” remembered that the trolley car which would take them out to the river, must pass Lily’s door; “I hope it will rain,” he thought, uneasily.

However, on that serene September Sunday a week later, it didn’t rain; and Maurice fell into the spirit of Edith’s plans; for, after all, even if the car did pass Lily’s ugly little house, it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody!  “I’ll sit with my back to that side of the street,” he told himself.  “It’s safe enough!  And it will give Buster a good time.”  He didn’t realize that he rather hankered for a good time himself; to be sure, he felt a hundred years old!  But money was no longer a very keen anxiety (he had passed his twenty-fifth birthday); and the day was glittering with sunshine, and Edith would make coffee, and Eleanor would sing.  Yes!  Edith should have a good time!

They went clanging gayly along over the bridge, down Maple Street, and through the suburbs of Medfield until they came to the end of the car line, where they piled out, with all their impediments, and started for the river and the big locust.

“You’ll sing, Nelly,” Maurice said—­Eleanor’s face lighted with pleasure;—­“and I’ll tell Edith how a girl ought to behave on her wedding trip, and you can instruct Johnny how to elope.”

Then, with little Bingo springing joyously, but rather stiffly, ahead of them, they tramped across the yellowing stubble of the mowed field, talking of their coffee, and whether there would be too much wind for their fire—­and all the while Maurice was aware of Lily at No. 16; and Eleanor was remembering her hope of a time when she and Maurice would be coming here, and it would not be “just us”! and Johnny was thinking that Edith was intelligent—­for a woman; and Edith was telling herself that this kind of thing was some sense!

Eleanor, sitting down under the old locust, watched the three young people.  She wondered when Maurice would tell her to sing.  “The river is a lovely accompaniment, isn’t it?” she hinted.  No one replied.

“I’m going in wading after dinner,” Edith announced; “what do you say, boys?  Let’s take off our shoes and stockings, and walk down to the second bridge.  Eleanor can sit here and guard our things.”