Edith nodded; then she said, with her straight look:  “You’re a perfect lamb, Maurice!  You are awfully”—­she wanted to say “patient,” but there was an implication in that; so she said, lamely—­“nice to Eleanor.”

“The Lord knows I ought to be!” he said, cynically.

“Yes; she just about killed herself to save you,” Edith agreed.

“Oh, not because of that!”

The misery in his voice startled her; she said, quickly, “How do you mean, Maurice?  I don’t understand.”

“I ought to be ‘nice’ to her.”

“But you are!  You are!”

“I’m not.”

“Maurice, I’m awfully fond of Eleanor; you won’t think I’m finding fault, or anything?  But sometimes, when she doesn’t feel very well, she—­you—­I mean, you really are a lamb, Maurice!”

Edith was twenty that summer—­a strong, gay creature; but her old, ridiculous, incorrigible candor (and that honest kiss in the darkness!) made her still a child to Maurice....  Yet Johnny Bennett was going to marry her!...  Maurice rested his chin on his left fist, and batted the fern; then he said: 

“I’ve been infernally mean to Eleanor.  It’s little enough to be ‘nice,’ as you call it, now.”

She flew to his defense.  “Talk sense!  You never did a mean thing in your life.”

His shrug fired her into a frankness which she regretted the next minute.  “Maurice, you are too good for Eleanor—­or anybody,” she ended, hastily.

He gave her a look of entreaty for understanding—­though he knew, he thought, that in her ignorance of life she couldn’t understand even if she had been told!  Yet for the mere relief of speaking, he skirted the ugly truth: 

“I can’t be too patient with her when she’s forlorn, because I—­I haven’t played the game with her.”

“It’s up to her to forgive that!”

“She doesn’t know it.”

“Maurice!  You haven’t a secret from Eleanor?”

Her dismay was like a stab.  “Edith, I can’t help it!  It was a long time ago—­but it would upset her to know that I’d—­well, failed her in any way.”  His face was so wrung that Edith could have cried; but she said what she thought: 

“Secrets are horrid, Maurice.  You’ve made a mistake.”

“A ’mistake’?” He almost laughed at the devilish humor of that little word ‘mistake,’ as applied to his ruined life.  “Well, yes, Edith; I made a ‘mistake,’ all right.”

“Oh, I don’t mean a ‘mistake’ as to this thing you say that Eleanor wouldn’t like,” Edith said.  “I mean not telling her.”

He shook his head; with that nagging thought of Jacky in the back of his mind, it was impossible not to smile at her dogmatic ignorance.

“Because,” Edith explained, “secrets trip you into fibbing.”

“You bet they do!  I’m quite an accomplished liar.”

Edith did not smile; she spoke with impatient earnestness:  “That’s perfectly silly; you are not a liar!  You couldn’t lie to save your life, and you know it.”  Maurice laughed.  “Why, Maurice, don’t you suppose I know you, through and through? I know what you are!—­a ‘perfec’ gentil knight.’”