At which she retreated into the silence of hurt feelings.  Once, she knelt down, her face hidden on the grimy bed-spread, and prayed:  “God, please give us a child—­that will make him happy.  And show me what to do to please him!  Show me!  Oh, show me!  I’ll do anything!” And who can say that her prayer was not answered?  For certainly an idea did spring into her mind:  those tiresome people downstairs—­he liked to talk to them;—­to Miss Moore, who giggled, and tried, Eleanor thought, to seem learned; and to the elderly woman who told stories.  How could he enjoy talking to them when he could talk to her?  But he did.  So, suppose she tried to be more sociable with them?  “I might invite Mrs. Davis to come up to our room some evening—­and I would sing for her? ...  But not Miss Moore; she is too silly, with her jokes!” Her mind strained to find ways to be friendly with these people he seemed to like.  And circumstances helped her....

That was the month of the great eclipse.  For a week Miss Ladd’s boarders had talked about it, exchanging among themselves much newspaper astronomical misinformation—­which the learned Miss Moore good-naturedly corrected.  It was her suggestion that the household should make a night of it:  “Let’s all go up on the roof and see the show!” So the friendly gayety was planned—­a supper in the basement dining room at half past eleven—­ginger ale! ice cream! chocolate!  Then an adjournment en masse to the top of the house.  Of course Miss Moore, engineering the affair, invited the Curtises, confident of a refusal—­and an acceptance;—­both of which, indeed, she secured; but, to her astonishment, it was Mr. Curtis who declined, and his wife who accepted.

“It’s a bore,” Maurice told Eleanor, listlessly.

She looked worried:  “Oh, I am so sorry!  I told them at luncheon that we would come.  I thought you’d enjoy it” (Her acceptance, which had been a real sacrifice to her, was a bomb to the other boarders.  “What has happened?” they said to each other, blankly.  “She’ll be an awful wet blanket,” some one said, frowning; and some one else said, “She’s accepted because she won’t let him out at night, alone!”)

When the heterogeneous household gathered in the dining room, and corks popped and jokes were made, Eleanor and Maurice were there; he, watching the other people eat and drink and saying almost nothing; she, talking nervously and trying hard to be slangy about astronomy.  Once he looked at her with faint interest—­for she was so evidently “trying”!  At midnight they all toiled up four flights of stairs from the basement to the garret, where, with proper squeamishness on the part of the ladies, and much gallantry of pushing and pulling on the part of the gentlemen, and all sorts of awkwardnesses and displaying of legs, they climbed a ladder and got out through the scuttle on to the flat roof.  Then came the calculating of minutes, and facetiousness as to other people’s watches and directions as to what one might expect to see.  “It’ll look like a bite out of a cookie, when it begins,” the bond salesman said; and Miss Ladd tittered, and said what the ladies wanted to see was the man in the moon!