Maurice, on the sloping roof, in the chill September dawn, his fingers numb on the frosty nails, stopped hammering, and leaned his chin on his fist, and thought:  “She’s sick.  She almost killed herself to save me; so her nerve has all gone.  That’s why she talked—­that way.”  He put a shingle in its place, and planted a nail; “it was because she was scared that what she did was so brave!  I couldn’t make her see that the more scared she was, the braver she was.  It wouldn’t have been brave in that gump, Edith, without a nerve in her body.  But why is she down on Edith?  I suppose she’s a nuisance to a person with a wonderful mind like Eleanor’s.  Talks too much.  I’ll tell her to dry up when she’s with Eleanor.”  And again he heard that strange voice:  “You like to talk to a child.”

Maurice, pounding away on Edith’s roof, grew hot with misery, not because it was so terrible to have Eleanor angry with him; not even because he had finally got mad, and answered back, and said, “Don’t be silly!” The real misery was something far deeper than this half-amused remorse.  It was that those harmless, scolding words of his held a perfectly new idea:  he had said, “Don’t be silly.” Was Eleanor silly?

Now, to a man whose feeling about his wife has been a sort of awe, this question is terrifying.  Maurice, in his boy’s heart, had worshiped in Eleanor, not just the god of Love, but the love of God.  And was she—­silly?  No!  Of course not!  He pounded violently, hit his thumb, put it into his mouth, then proceeded, mumblingly, to bring his god back from the lower shrine of a pitying heart, to the high alter of a justifying mind:  Eleanor was ill....  She was nervous....  She was an exquisite being of mist and music and courage and love!  So of course she was sensitive to things ordinary people did not feel.  Saying this, and fitting the shingles into place, suddenly the warm and happy wave of confident idealism began to flood in upon him, and immediately his mind as well as his heart was satisfied.  He reproached himself for having been scared lest his star was just a common candle, like himself.  He had been cruel to judge her, as he might have judged her had she been well—­or a gump like Edith!  For had she been well, she would not have been “silly”!  Had she been well—­instead of lying there in her bed, white and strained and trembling, all because she had saved his life, harnessing herself to that wagon, and bringing him, in the darkness, through a thousand terrors—­nonexistent, to be sure, but none the less real—­to safety and life!  Oh, how could he have even thought the word “silly”?  He was ashamed and humble; never again would he be cross to her!  “Silly?  I’m the silly one!  I’m an ass.  I’ll tell her so!  I don’t suppose she’ll ever forgive me.  She said I ‘didn’t understand her’; well, I didn’t!  But she’ll never have cause to say it again!  I understand her now,” Then, once more, he thought, frowning, “But why is she so down on Edith?”