They spread out their luncheon, and Maurice expressed his opinion of it:  “This cake is the limit!” He threw a piece of it at the little dog.  “There, Bingo!...  Eleanor, he’s losing his waist line.  But this cake won’t fatten him!  It’s sawdust.”

“Hannah is a poor cook,” she agreed, nervously; “but if I didn’t keep her I don’t know what she would do, she’s so awfully deaf!  She couldn’t get another place.”

“Why don’t you teach her to do things?  I suppose she thinks we can live on love,” he said, chuckling.

She bit her lip,—­and thought of Mrs. Newbolt.  “Because I don’t know how myself,” she said.

“Why don’t you learn?” he suggested, feeding the rest of his cake to Bingo; “Edith used to make bully cake—­”

She said, with a worried look, that she would try—­

Instantly he was patient and very gentle, and said that the cake didn’t matter at all!  “But I move we try boarding.”

They were silent, watching the slipping gleam on the ripples, until Eleanor said, “Oh, Maurice,—­if we only had a child!”

“Maybe we will some day,” he said, cheerfully.  Then, to tease Bingo, he put his arms around his wife and hugged her,—­which made the little dog burst into a volley of barks!  Maurice laughed, but remembered that he was hungry and said again, “Let’s board.”

Eleanor, soothing Bingo, wild-eyed and trembling with jealous love, said no! she would try to have things better.  “Perhaps I’ll get as clever as Edith,” she said—­and her lip hardened.

He said he wished she would:  “Edith used to make a chocolate cake I’d sell my soul for, pretty nearly!  Why didn’t Hannah give us hard-boiled eggs?” he pondered, burrowing in the luncheon basket for something more to eat; “they don’t take brains!”

Of course he was wrong; any cooking takes brains—­and nobody seemed able, in his little household, to supply them.  However, boarding was such a terrible threat, that Eleanor, dismayed at the idea of leaving that little room, waiting at the top of the house, with its ducks and shepherdesses; and thinking, too, of a whole tableful of people who would talk to Maurice! made heroic efforts to help Hannah, her mind fumbling over recipes and ingredients, as her hands fumbled over dishes and oven doors and dampers.  She only succeeded in burning her wrist badly, and making the deaf Hannah say she didn’t want a lady messing up her kitchen.

By degrees, however, “living on love” became more and more uncomfortable, and in October the fiasco of a little dinner for Henry Houghton made Maurice say definitely that, when their lease expired, they would board.  Mr. Houghton had come to Mercer on business, bringing Edith with him, as a sort of spree for the child; and when he got home he summed up his experience to his Mary: 

“That daughter of yours will be the death of me!  There was one moment at dinner when only the grace of God kept me from wringing her neck.  In the first place, she commented upon the food—­which was awful!—­with her usual appalling candor.  But when she began on the ’harp’—­”