“I loved it.”  His heart was pounding in his throat....  “Eleanor” (he could hardly see that terrible path among the stars, but he stumbled upward), “Eleanor, I’m not good enough for you.”

“Not good enough?  For me?” She laughed at such absurdity.  He was sitting down, his elbow on his knee, his head in his hand.  She came and knelt beside him.  “If you are only happy!  I did it to make you happy.”

She heard him catch his breath.  “How much do you love me?” he said.

(Oh, how long it was since he had talked that way—­asking the sweet, unanswerable question of happy love!—­how long since he had spoken with so much precious foolishness!) “How much?  Why, Maurice, I love you so that sometimes, when I see you talking to other people—­even these tiresome people here in the house, I could just die!  I want you all to myself!  I—­I guess I feel about you the way Bingo feels about me,” she said, trying to joke—­but there were tears in her eyes.

“I’m not always ... what I ought to be,” he said; “I am not—­” (the path was very dim)—­“awfully good.  I—­”

“I suppose I’m naturally jealous,” she confessed; “I could die for you, Maurice; but I couldn’t share your little finger!  Do you remember, on our wedding day, you made me promise to be jealous?  Well, I am.”  She laughed—­and he was dumb.  There, on the roof, Truth seemed as inevitable as Law.  It did not seem inevitable now.  He had lost his way among the stars.  He could not find words to begin his story.  But words overflowed on Eleanor’s lips!...  “Sometimes I get to thinking about myself—­I am older than you, you know, a little.  Not that it matters, really; but when I see you with other people, and you seem to enjoy talking to them—­it nearly kills me!  And you do like to talk to them.  You even like to talk to—­Edith, who is rude to me!” Her words poured out sobbingly:  “Why, why am I not enough for you?  You are enough for me!”

He was silent.

“And ... and ... and we haven’t a baby,” she said in a whisper, and dropped her face on his knee.

He tried to lift her, but his soul was sinking within him; dropping down—­down from the awful heights.  Yet still he caught at Truth!  “Dear, don’t!  As for people, I may talk to them; I may even—­even be with them, or seem to like them, and—­and do things, that—­I don’t love anybody but you, Eleanor; but I—­I—­”

It was a final clutch at the Hand that holds the stars.  But his entreating voice broke, for she was kissing his confession from his lips.  Those last words—­“I don’t love anybody but you”—­folded her in complete content!  “Dear,” she said, “that’s all I want—­that you don’t love anybody but me.”  She laid her wet cheek against his in silence.

What could he do but be silent, too?  What could he do but choke down the confessing, redeeming words that were on his lips?  So he did choke them down, turning his back on the clean freedom of Truth; and the burden of his squalid secret, which he had been ready to throw away forever, was again packed like some corroding thing in his soul....