“She’s not that kind, Mary.”

“Dear, almost every woman is ‘that kind’!  It’s deception, not confession, that makes them—­the other kind.  If Maurice will confess—­”

“I haven’t said there was anything to confess,” he protested, in alarm.

“Oh no; certainly not.  You haven’t said a word! (Well; you may have just one of those little cigars—­you poor dear!) Henry, listen:  If Maurice hangs a secret round his neck it will drown him.”

“If Eleanor would make cocoa for him at one o’clock in the morning there would be no chance for secrets.  Kit, I have long known that you are the wisest, as well as the most virtuous and most lovable of your sex, and that I shall only get to heaven by hanging on to your petticoats; but in this one particular I am much more intelligent than you.”

“Heaven send you a good opinion of yourself!” his wife murmured.

But he insisted.  “On certain subjects women prefer to be lied to.”

“Did any woman ever tell you so?” she inquired, dryly.

He shrugged his shoulders, put his cup down, and came over to give her a kiss.

“Which is to say, ’Hold your tongue’?” his Mary inquired.

“Oh, never!” he said, and in spite of his distress he laughed; but he looked at her tenderly.  “The Lord was good to me, Mary, when He made you take me.”

That talk in the studio marked the moment when Maurice Curtis turned his back on youth.  It was the beginning of the retreat of an ardent and gayly candid boy into the adult sophistications of Secrecy.  The next day when he and Eleanor returned to Mercer, he sat in the car watching with unseeing eyes the back of her head,—­her swaying hat, the softly curling tendrils of dark hair in the nape of her neck—­and he saw before him a narrow path, leading—­across quaking bogs of evasions!—­toward a goal of always menaced safety.  Mr. Houghton had indicated the path in that midnight talk, and Maurice’s first step upon it would be his promise to relieve Lily of the support of her child—­“on condition that she would never communicate with him again.”  After that, Henry Houghton said, “the lawyer will clinch things; and nobody will ever be the wiser!” Because Eleanor was the woman she was, he saw no way of escape for Maurice, except through this bog of secrecy, where any careless step might plunge him into a lie.  He had not dared to point out that other path, which his Mary thought so much safer than the sucking shakiness of the swamp—­the rough and terrible path of confession, which lies across the firm aridities of Truth, and leads to that orderly freedom of the stars to which Maurice had once aspired!  So now the boy was going back to Mercer to plunge into the pitfalls and limitless shades of concealment.  He did it with a hard purpose of endurance, without hope, and also without complaint.

“If I can just avoid out-and-out lying,” he told himself, “I can take my medicine.  But if I have to lie—!”