The color flickered on Eleanor’s cheeks:  “Edith, I’ll rest now,” she said; her voice broke.

Edith looked at her, open-mouthed.  “Why, Eleanor!” she said; “what’s the matter?  Are you mad at anything?  Have you a stomachache?  I’ll run for mother!”

“There’s nothing the matter.  But—­but I wish you’d tell Maurice to come and speak to me.”

Edith tore downstairs, and out of the front door:  “Maurice!  Where are you?”—­then, catching sight of him, reading and smoking in a hammock slung between two of the big columns on the east porch, she rushed at him, and pulled him to his astonished feet.  “Eleanor wants you!  Something’s the matter, and—­”

Before she could finish, Maurice was tearing upstairs, two steps at a time....

And so it was that Edith, sulkily, worked on the roof by herself.

Yet Maurice had not entirely “backed out.” ...  The very next morning, before Edith was awake, he had gone out to the henhouse, and, alone, done more than his share of the shingling.

“But, Maurice, why didn’t you wake me?” Edith protested, when she discovered what he had done.  “I’d have gone out, too!”

“I liked doing it by myself,” Maurice evaded.

And for five minutes Edith was sulky again.  “He puts on airs, ’cause he’s married!  Well, I don’t care.  He can shingle the whole roof by himself if he wants to!  I don’t like married men, anyhow.”

The married man had, indeed, wanted to be by himself—­to put the nails in his mouth, and to sit on the cold, slippery shingles in the gray September morning, and to tap-tap-tap—­and think, and think.

But he didn’t like his thoughts very well....

He thought how he had rushed upstairs, terrified lest Eleanor was fainting or had a “stomachache,” or something—­and found her sitting up in bed, her cheeks red and glazed with tears, her round, full chin quivering.  He thought how he had tried to make out what she was driving at about Edith, and the chicken coop, and the ridgepole!

“You told Edith I was scared!”

Maurice’s bewilderment was full of stumbling questions:  “Told Edith?  When?  What?”

And as she said “when” and “what,” ending with, “You said I am scared!” Maurice could only say, blankly.  “But my darling, you are!”

“You may think I am a fool, but to tell Edith so—­”

“But Great Scott!  I didn’t!”

“I won’t have you talking me over with Edith; she’s a child!  It was just what you did when you danced three times with that girl who said—­Edith is as rude as she was!—­and she’s a child.  How can you like to be with a child?” Of course, it was all her fear of Youth,—­but Eleanor did not know that; she thought she was hurt at the boy’s neglect.  Her face, wet with tears, was twitching, her voice—­that lovely voice!—­was shrill in his astonished ears....