“Mother has virtue enough for the family,” Edith said; “I’m going to stay here with father.”

“It will be a jewel in your crown,” Henry Houghton told his Mary.

“Why not collect jewels for your crown?” she inquired.  “Henry, Maurice looks troubled.  What do you suppose is the matter?”

“He does look seedy,” he agreed; “poke about and find out what’s wrong.  You can do it better if your inelegant offspring isn’t around, and if I’m not there, either.  He won’t open his lips to me!  I think it’s money.  He’s carrying a pretty heavy load.  But he never peeps....  I wish he wouldn’t economize on cigars, though; he offered me one yesterday, and politeness compelled me to smoke it!”

“’Peeps’!” said Edith; “how elegant!”

So that was how it happened that Mary Houghton went alone to dine with Maurice and Eleanor.  But she couldn’t discover, in Maurice’s talk or Eleanor’s silences, any hint of financial anxiety.  “So,” she said to herself, “it isn’t money that worries him.”  When he walked back with her to the hotel after dinner, he was thinking, “She’d know what to do about Jacky.”  But of course he couldn’t ask her what to do!  He could never ask anybody—­except, perhaps, Mr. Houghton; and what would he, an old man, know about bringing up a little boy?  He was listening, not very closely, to Mrs. Houghton’s talk of the Custom House; but when she said, “John Bennett met us on the dock,” he was suddenly attentive.

“Has Edith—?” he began.

She laughed ruefully.  “No.  Young people are not what they were in my day.  Edith is not a bit sentimental.”

Maurice was silent.  When they reached the hotel, they went upstairs into a vast, bleak parlor, and steered their way among enormous plush armchairs to a sofa.  A few electric bulbs, glaring among the glass prisms of a remote chandelier, made a dim light—­but not too dim for Mary Houghton to see that Maurice’s face was drawn and worried; involuntarily she said: 

“You dear boy, I wish you didn’t look so careworn!”

“I’m bothered about something,” he said.

“Your uncle Henry told me to ‘poke around,’ and see if you were troubled about money?” she said, smiling.

“Oh, not especially.  I’m always more or less strapped.  But money isn’t worth bothering about, really.”

“If you ‘consider the stars,’ you will find very few things are worth bothering about!  Except, of course, wrongdoing.”

And, to his own astonishment, he found himself saying, “I’m afraid that’s where I come in!” As he spoke, he remembered that night of the eclipse—­oh, those moon-washed depths, those stupendous serenities of Law and Beauty which, together, are Truth!  How passionately he had desired Truth.  And now Mrs. Houghton was saying “Consider the stars.”  “If I could only tell her!” he thought.

“If the wrongdoing is behind you,” said Mary Houghton, “let it go.”

“It won’t let me go,” he said, with nervous lightness.  “Though it’s behind me, all right!”