“Oh, I wish I was married,” Edith said; “I’d just love to save my husband’s life!”

Maurice said little, except to ask Johnny if he had got to such and such a place in the Adventures, or to assent to Edith’s ecstasies; but once he sighed, and said Eleanor was awfully pulled down by that—­that night.

“I should think,” Edith said, “you’d feel she’d just about died for you, like people in history who died for each other.”

“I do,” Maurice said, soberly.

When they drove home in the dusk, Maurice singing, loudly; Edith, on the front seat of the wagon, snuggling against him; Johnny standing up, balancing himself by holding on to their shoulders, and old Rover jogging along on the footpath,—­they were all in great spirits, until a turn in the road showed them Eleanor, sitting on a log, looking rather white.

“Suffering snakes!” said Maurice, breaking off in the middle of a word.  Before Lion could quite stop, he was at his wife’s side.  “Eleanor!  How did you get here? ...  You walked?  Oh, Star, you oughtn’t to have done such a thing!”

“I was frightened about you.  It was so late.  I was afraid something had happened.  I came to look for you.”

Edith and Johnny looked on aghast; then Edith called out:  “Why, Eleanor!  I wouldn’t let anything happen to Maurice!”

Maurice, kneeling beside his wife, had put his arms around her and was soothing her with all sorts of gentlenesses:  “Dear, you mustn’t worry so!  Nelly, don’t cry; why, darling, we were having such a good time, we never noticed that it was getting late ...”

“You forgot me,” Eleanor said; “as long as you had Edith, you never thought how I might worry!” She hid her face in her hands.

Maurice came back to the wagon; “Edith,” he said, in a low voice, “would you and Johnny mind getting out and walking?  I’ll bring Eleanor along later.  I’m sorry, but she’s—­she’s tired.”

Edith said in a whisper, “’Course not!” Then, without a look behind her at the crying woman on the log, and the patient, mortified boy bending over her, she, and the disgusted and more deliberate Johnny, ran down the road into the twilight.  Edith was utterly bewildered.  With her inarticulate consciousness of the impropriety of emotion, naked, in public! was the shyness of a child in meeting a stranger—­for that crying woman was practically a stranger.  She wasn’t the Bride—­silent and lovely!  At Johnny’s gate she said, briefly, “’Night!” and went on, running—­running in the dusk.  When she reached the house, and found her father and mother on the east porch, she was breathless, which accounted for her brevity in saying that Maurice and Eleanor were coming—­and she was just starved!  In the dining room, eating a very large supper, she listened for the wheels of the wagon and reflected:  “Why was Eleanor mad at me?  She was mad at Maurice, too.  But most at me.  Why?” She took an enormous spoonful of sliced peaches, and stared blankly ahead of her.