Which made her say, gently, “Maurice, perhaps I know what troubles you?” His start made her add, quickly:  “Your uncle Henry has never betrayed your confidence; but ...  I guessed, long ago, that something had gone wrong.  I don’t know how wrong—­”

“Oh, Mrs. Houghton,” he said, despairingly, “awfully wrong!  Awfully—­awfully wrong!” He put his elbow on his knee, and rested his chin on his clenched fist; she was silent.  Then he said:  “You’ve always been an angel to me.  I am glad you guessed.  Because—­I don’t know what to do.”

“About the woman?”

“No.  The boy.”

“Oh!” she said; “a child!”

Her dismay was like a blow.  “But you said you had ’guessed’?”

“I guessed that there was a woman; but I didn’t know—­” She put her arm over his shoulders and kissed him.  “My poor Maurice!” The tears stood in her eyes.

“I told you it was ‘awful,’” he said, simply; “yes, it is my little boy; I’m worried to death about him.  Lily—­that’s her name—­is perfectly all right; she means well, and adores him, and all that; but—­” Then he told her what Jacky’s mother had been and what she was now; and the illustrations he gave of Lily’s ignorance of ethical standards made Mary Houghton cringe.  “She’s ruining the little fellow,” he said; “he’s not mean nor a coward—­I’ll say that for him!  But he lies whenever he feels like it, and honesty only means not getting ‘pinched.’  She’s awfully ambitious for him; but her idea of success is what she calls ‘Society,’ Oh, it’s such a relief to speak to you, Mrs. Houghton!  I haven’t a soul I can talk to.”

“Maurice, can’t you get him?” Her voice was shocked.

He almost laughed.  “Wild horses wouldn’t drag him from Lily!”

She was silent before the complexity of the situation—­the furtive paternity, with its bewildered sense of responsibility, in conflict with the passion of the dam!

“I have to be so infernally secret,” Maurice said.  “If it wasn’t for that, I could train him a little, because he’s fond of me,” he explained—­and for a moment his face relaxed into one of his old charming smiles.  “He really is an awfully fine little beggar.  I swear I believe he’s musical!  And he’s confoundedly clever.  Why, he said—­” Mrs. Houghton could have wept with the pitifulness of it!  For Maurice went on, like any proud young father, with a story of how his little boy had said this or done that.  “But he’s fresh, sometimes, and he’s the kind that, if he got fresh, ought to be licked.  She can’t make him mind; but”—­here the poor, shamed pride shone again in his blue eyes—­“he minds me!”

Mary Houghton was silent; she tried to consider the stars, but her dismay at a child endangered, came between her and the eternal tranquillities.  “The boy must be saved,” she thought, “at any cost!  It isn’t a question of Maurice’s happiness; it’s a question of his obligation.”

“This thing of having a secret hanging round your neck is hell!” Maurice told her.  “Every minute I think—­’Suppose Eleanor should find out?’”