Her voice was a dream sound, too, he thought; a wordless tenderness for her flooded his mind, as the perfume of the primroses flooded the night.  It seemed as if the lovely ignorance of her was itself a perfume! “’Tell Eleanor’!  She doesn’t know the wickedness of the world, and I don’t want her to.”  He put his hand on her shoulder in the old, brotherly way—­but drew it back as if something had burned him!  That recoil should have revealed things to him, but it didn’t.  So far as his own consciousness went, he was too intent on what he called “the square deal” for Eleanor, to know what had happened to him; all he knew was that Edith, all of a sudden, was grown up!  Her childishness was gone.  He mustn’t even put his hand on her shoulder!  He had an uneasy moment of wondering—­“Girls are so darned knowing, nowadays!”—­whether she might be suspicious as to what that secret was, which she had advised him to “tell Eleanor”?  But that was only for a moment; “Edith’s not that kind of a girl.  And, anyway, she’d never think of such a thing of me—­which makes me all the more rotten!” So he clutched at Edith’s undeserved faith in him, and said, “She’ll never think of that.”  Still, she was grown up ... and he mustn’t touch her. (This was one of the times when he was not worrying about Jacky!)

Edith, talking animatedly of primroses, had her absorbing thoughts, too; they were nothing but furious denial!  “Maurice—­horrid?  Never!” Then, on the very breath of “Never,” came again the insistent reminder:  “But he could tell me anything, except—­” So, thinking of just one thing, and talking of many other things, she walked up and down the primrose path with Maurice.  They neither of them wanted to go back to the three older people:  the father and mother—­and wife.

Eleanor, on the porch, strained her eyes into the dusk; now and then she caught a glimmer of the dim whiteness of Edith’s skirt, or heard Maurice’s voice.  She was suffering so that by and by she said, briefly, to her hosts—­her trembling with unshed tears—­“Good night,” and went upstairs, alone—­an old, crying woman.  Eleanor had been unreasonable many times; but this time she was not unreasonable!  That night anyone could have seen that she was, to Maurice, as nonexistent as any other elderly woman might have been.  The Houghtons saw it, and when she went into the house Mary Houghton said, with distress: 

“She suffers!”

Her husband nodded, and said he wished he was asleep.  “Why,” he demanded, “are women greater fools about this business than men?  Poor Maurice ventures to talk to Edith of ’shoes and ships and sealing wax,’—­and Eleanor weeps!  Why are there more jealous women than men?”

“Because,” Mary Houghton said, dryly, “more men give cause for jealousy than women.”

“Touche!  Touche!” he conceded; then added, quickly, “But Maurice isn’t giving any cause.”

“Well, I’m not so sure,” she said.