It came to the rescue of Maurice and Eleanor; they had many welding moments of anxiety on his part, and eager self-sacrifice on her part; of adding up columns of figures, with a constantly increasing total, which had to be subtracted from a balance which decreased so rapidly that Eleanor felt quite sure that the bank was cheating them!  Of course they did not appreciate the value of this blessed young poverty—­who of us ever appreciates poverty while we are experiencing it?  We only know its value when we look back upon it!  But they did—­or at least Eleanor did—­appreciate their isolation, never realizing that no human life can refresh another unless it may itself drink deep of human sympathies and hopes.  Maurice could take this refreshment through business contacts; but, except for Mrs. O’Brien, and her baby grandson, Don, Eleanor’s acquaintances in Mercer had been limited to her aunt’s rather narrow circle.

When Mrs. Newbolt got back from Europe, Maurice was introduced to this circle at a small dinner given to the bride and groom to indicate family forgiveness.  The guests were elderly people, who talked politics and surgical operations, and didn’t know what to say to Maurice, whose blond hair and good-humored blue eyes made him seem distressingly young.  Nor did Maurice know what to say to them.

“I’d have gone to sleep,” he told Eleanor, in exploding mirth, on their way home, “if it hadn’t been that the food was so mighty good!  I kept awake, in spite of that ancient dame who hashed up the Civil War, just to see what the next course would be!”

It was about this time that Maurice began to show a little longing for companionship (outside the office) of a kind which did not remember the Civil War.  His evenings of solitaire and music were awfully nice, but—­

“Brown and Hastings are in college,” he told his wife; “and Mort’s on a job at his father’s mills.  I miss ’em like the devil.”

“I don’t want anyone but you,” she said, and the tears started to her eyes; he asked her what she was crying about, and she said, “Oh, nothing.”  But of course he knew what it was, and he had to remind himself that “she had nervous prostration”; otherwise that terrible, hidden word “silly” would have been on his lips.

Eleanor, too, had a hidden word; it was the word “boy.”  It was Mrs. Newbolt who thrust it at her, in those first days of settling down into the new house.  She had come in, waddling ponderously on her weak ankles, to see, she said, how the young people were getting along:  “At least, one of you is young!” Mrs. Newbolt said, jocosely.  She was still puffing from a climb upstairs, to find Eleanor, dusty and disheveled, in a little room in the top of the house.  She was sitting on the floor in front of a trunk, with Bingo fast asleep on her skirt.

“What’s this room to be?” said Mrs. Newbolt; then looked at the wall paper, gay with prancing lambs and waddling ducks, and Noah’s Ark trees.  “What! a nursery?” said Mrs. Newbolt; “do you mean—?”