“She’ll love you!  She’s a peach.  And little Skeezics—­”

“Who is Skeezics?”

“Edith.  Their kid.  Eleven years old.  She paid me the compliment of announcing, when she was seven, that she was going to marry me when she grew up!  But I believe, now, she has a crush on Sir Walter Raleigh.  She’ll adore you, too.”

“I’m afraid of them all,” she confessed; “they won’t like—­an elopement.”

“They’ll fall over themselves with joy to think I’m settled for life!  I’m afraid I’ve been a cussed nuisance to Uncle Henry,” he said, ruefully; “always doing fool things, you know,—­I mean when I was a boy.  And he’s been great, always.  But I know he’s been afraid I’d take a wild flight in actresses.”

“‘Wild’ flight?  What will he call—­” She caught her breath.

“He’ll call it a ’wild flight in angels’!” he said.

The word made her put a laughing and protesting hand (which he kissed) over his lips.  Then she said that she remembered Mr. Houghton:  “I met him a long time ago; when—­when you were a little boy.”

“And yet here you are, ‘Mrs. Maurice Curtis!’ Isn’t it supreme?” he demanded.  The moment was so beyond words that it made him sophomoric—­which was appropriate enough, even though his freshman year had been halted by those examinations, which had so “jarred” his guardian.  “I’ll be twenty in September,” he said.  Evidently the thought of his increasing years gave him pleasure.  That Eleanor’s years were also increasing did not occur to him; and no wonder, for, compared to people like Mr. and Mrs. Houghton, Eleanor was young enough!—­only thirty-nine.  It was back in the ’nineties that she had met her husband’s guardian, who, in those days, had been the owner of a cotton mill in Mercer, but who now, instead of making money, cultivated potatoes (and tried to paint).  Eleanor knew the Houghtons when they were Mercer mill folk, and, as she said, this charming youngster—­living then in Philadelphia—­had been “a little boy”; now, here he was, her husband for “fifty-four minutes.”  And she was almost forty, and he was nineteen.  That Henry Houghton, up on his mountain farm, pottering about in his big, dusty studio, and delving among his potatoes, would whistle, was to be expected.

“But who cares?” Maurice said.  “It isn’t his funeral.”

“He’ll think it’s yours,” she retorted, with a little laugh.  She was not much given to laughter.  Her life had been singularly monotonous and, having seen very little of the world, she had that self-distrust which is afraid to laugh unless other people are laughing, too.  She taught singing at Fern Hill, a private school in Mercer’s suburbs.  She did not care for the older pupils, but she was devoted to the very little girls.  She played wonderfully on the piano, and suffered from indigestion; her face was at times almost beautiful; she had a round, full chin, and a lovely red lower lip; her forehead was very white, with soft, dark hair