So, after that night of terror and turmoil,—­when Eleanor had fainted—­Maurice’s life in his own house settled again into the old tranquil forlornness, enlivened only by those Sunday-afternoon visits from Edith.

And Eleanor?...  There had been some dumb days, when she moved about the house or sat opposite Maurice at table, or exercised Bingo, like an automaton.  Sometimes she sat at her window, looking down through the bare branches of the poplar at the still, wintry garden; the painted table, heaped with grimy snow slowly melting in the chill March sunshine; the dead stalks of the lilies on each side of the icy bricks of the path; the rusty bars of the iron gate, through which, now and then, came the glimmer, a block away, of the river—­“their river”!  Sometimes for an hour her mind numbly considered these things; then would come a fierce throb of pain:  “He was all the time saying he ‘couldn’t afford’ things; that was so he could give her money, I suppose?” Then blank listlessness again.  She did not suffer very much.  She was too stunned to suffer.  She merely said to herself, vaguely, “I’ll leave him.”  It may have been on the third day that, when she said, “I will leave him; he has been false to me,” her mind whispered back, very faintly, like an echo, “He has been false to himself.”  For just a moment she loved him enough to think that he had sinned. Maurice has sinned! When she said that, the dismay of it made her forget herself.  She said it with horror, and after a while she added a question:  “Why did he do it?” Then came beating its way up through anger and wounded pride, and suffering love, still another question:  “Was it my fault that he did it?  Did he fall in love with that frightful woman because I failed him?” Instantly her mind sheered off from this question:  “I did everything I knew how to make him happy!  I would have died to make him happy.  I adored him!  How could he care for that common, ignorant woman I saw on the porch?  A woman who wasn’t a lady.  A—­a bad woman!” But yet the question repeated itself:  “Why?  Why?” It demanded an answer:  Why did Maurice—­high-minded, pure-hearted, overflowing with a love as beautiful, and as perfect as Youth itself—­how could Maurice be drawn to such a woman?  And by and by the answer struggled to her lips, tearing her heart as it came with dreadful pain:  “He did it because I didn’t make him happy.”

Just as Maurice, recognizing the responsibility of creation, had, at the touch of his son’s little hand, felt the tremor of a moral conception, so now Eleanor, barren so long! felt the pangs of a birth of spiritual responsibility:  “I didn’t make him happy, so—­Oh, my poor Maurice, it was my fault!"...  But of course this divine self-forgetfulness in self-reproach, was as feeble as any new-born thing.  When it stirred, and uttered little elemental sounds—­“my fault, my fault”—­she forgot the wrong he had done her, in seeing the wrong he had done himself....