That Eleanor’s irritation was jealousy—­not of Edith, but of Edith’s years—­never occurred to him.  So all he said was, “She oughtn’t to be down on Edith; she has always appreciated her!” Edith had never said that Eleanor was “silly”!  But so long as it bothered Eleanor (being nervous) to have the imp round, he’d tell her not to be a nuisance.  “You can say anything to Skeezics; she has sense.  She understands.”

But all the same, Maurice shingled his part of the henhouse before breakfast.

Maurice did not call Eleanor “silly” again for a long time.  There was always—­when she was unreasonable—­the curbing memory that her reasonableness had been shaken by that assault of darkness and fear, and the terrible fatigue of saving his robust young life.  Furthermore, Doctor Bennett—­telling Henry Houghton that Eleanor had done the worst possible thing, “magnificently”—­told Maurice she had “nervous prostration,”—­a cloaking phrase which kindly doctors often give to perplexed husbands, so that the egotism of sickly wives may be covered up!  So Maurice, repeating to himself these useful words, saw only ill health, not silliness, in Eleanor’s occasional tears.  It was a week after the shingling of the henhouse, that, leaving her to recuperate still further at Green Hill, he started in on his job of “office boy”—­his jocose title for his position in the real-estate office in Mercer.  Eleanor did not want to be left, and said so, wistfully.

“I’ll come up for Sundays,” Maurice comforted her, tenderly.

On these weekly visits the Houghtons were impressed by his tenderness; he played solitaire with his wife by the hour; he read poetry to her until she fell asleep; and he told her everything he had done and every person he had seen, while he was away from her!  But the rest of the household didn’t get much enjoyment out of Eleanor.  Even the adoring Edith had moments when admiration had to be propped up by Doctor Bennett’s phrase.  As, for instance, on one of Maurice’s precious Sundays, he and she and Johnny Bennett and Rover and old Lion climbed up to the cabin to make things shipshape before closing the place for the winter.

“You’ll be away from me all day,” Eleanor said, and her eyes filled.

Maurice said he hated to leave her, but he had always helped Edith on this closing-up job.

“Oh, well; go, if you want to,” Eleanor said; “but I don’t see how you can enjoy being with a perfect child, like Edith!”

Maurice went—­not very happily.  But it was such a fine, tingling day of hard work, in a joyous wind, with resulting appetites, and much yelling at each other—­“Here, drop that!” ...  “Hurry up, slow poke!”—­that he was happy again before he knew it.  After the work was over they had a lazy hour before the fire, their eyes stinging with smoke which seemed to envelop them, no matter on which side they sat; an hour in which Rover drowsed at Maurice’s feet, and Johnny, in spectacles, read A Boy’s Adventures in the Forests of Brazil, and Edith gabbled about Eleanor....