She laughed, and Maurice threw up his hands.

“Bouquets,” Edith conceded, grinning; “but I won’t hand out any more, so you needn’t fish!  Well, I don’t know what on earth you’ve done, and I don’t care; and you can’t tell me, of course!  But one thing I do know; it isn’t fair to Eleanor not to tell her, because—­”

“My dear child—­”

“Because she wouldn’t really mind, she’s so awfully devoted to you.  Oh, Maurice, do tell Eleanor!” Then, even as she spoke, she was frightened; what was this thing that he did not dare to tell Eleanor?—­“or me?” Edith thought.  It couldn’t be that Maurice—­was not good?  Edith quailed at herself.  She had a quick impulse to say, “Forgive me, Maurice, for even thinking of such a horrid thing!” But all she said, aloud, briefly, was, “As I see it, telling Eleanor would be playing the game.”

Maurice put his hand over her fist, clenched with conviction on her knee.  “Skeezics,” he said, “you are the soundest thing the Lord ever made!  As it happens, it’s a thing I can’t talk about—­to anybody.  But I’ll never forget this, Edith.  And ... dear, I’m glad you’re going to be happy; you deserve the best man on earth, and old Johnny comes mighty darned near being the best!”

Edith, frowning, rose abruptly.  “Please don’t talk that way.  I hate that sort of talk!  Johnny is my friend; that’s all.  So, please never—­”

“I won’t,” Maurice said, meekly; but some swift exultation made him add to himself, “Poor old Johnny!” His face was radiant.

As for Edith, she hardly spoke all the way back to the house.  But not because of “poor old Johnny”!  She was absorbed by that intuition—­which she did not, she told herself, believe.  Yet it clamored in her mind:  Maurice had done something wrong.  Something so wrong, that he couldn’t speak of it, even to her!  Then it must be—?  “No! that’s impossible!” But with this recoil from a disgusting impossibility, came an upsurge of something she had never felt in her life—­something not unlike that emotion she had once called Bingoism—­a resentful consciousness that Maurice had not been as completely and confidentially her friend as she was his!

But Edith hadn’t a mean fiber in her!  Instantly, on the heels of that small pain came a greater and nobler pain:  “I can’t bear it if he has done anything wrong!  But if he has, it’s some wicked woman’s fault.”  As she said that, anger at an injury done to Maurice made her almost forget that first virginal repulsion—­and made her entirely forget that fleeting pain of knowing that she had not meant as much to him as he meant to her!  “But he hasn’t done anything wrong,” she insisted; “he wouldn’t look at a horrid? woman!”

“For Heaven’s sake, Edith,” Maurice remonstrated; “this isn’t any Marathon!  Go slow.  I’m not in any hurry to get home.”