Lily had not said she must have another hundred.  She did not even think so. “I can swing it!” Lily had said, sturdily.  And she did; but of course, as Maurice, to his intense discomfort, knew only too well, it was hard to swing it.  Even with what help he could give her, she couldn’t possibly have got along if she had not been astonishingly efficient and thrifty, always looking at both sides of a cent!  “I ain’t smoking any more,” Lily said once; “well, ’tain’t only to save money; but I don’t want Jacky to be getting any funny ideas!” (this when “Ernest Augustus” was only a few months old!) She had a tiny house on Maple Street, with a sun-baked front yard, in which a few shrubs caught the dust on their meager foliage; and she had a border of pansies in the shade under the bay window;—­“I must have flowers!” Lily said, apologetically;—­and she had three roomers, and she had scraped the locality for mealers.  She would have made more money if she had not fed her boarders so well.  “But there!” said Lily; “if I give ’em nice food, they’ll stay!” But, all the same, Maurice knew that two or three dollars more a week would “come in handy.”  His sense of irritated responsibility about her made him long for that twenty-fifth birthday which would bring him his own money.  For, in spite of Lily’s thriftiness, her expenses, as well as her toil, kept increasing, and Maurice, cursing himself whenever he thought that but for him she would be “on easy street” at Marston’s, had begun the inevitable borrowing.  The payment of the interest on his note was a tax on his salary; yet not so taxing as the necessity of being constantly on guard against some careless word which might make Eleanor ask questions about that salary.

But Eleanor asked very few questions about anything so practical as income.  Her interest in money matters, now, in regard to Edith, was merely that Edith was a means to an end—­Maurice could have his own home!  The finding a house, under Mrs. Newbolt’s candid guidance—­and Maurice’s worried reminders that he couldn’t “afford” more than so much rent!—­gave Eleanor the pleasantest summer she had had since that first summer when, in the meadow, she and Maurice had watched the clouds, and the locust blossoms, and told each other that nothing in heaven or earth, or the waters under the earth, could part them...

The old house they finally secured was in an unfashionable locality; there was a tailor shop next door and an undertaker across the street, and a clanging trolley car screeched on the curve at the end of the block; but the dignity of the pillared doorway, and the carved window casings, had appealed to Maurice; and also the discovery in the parlor, behind a monstrous air-tight stove, of a bricked-up fireplace (which he promptly tore open), all combined to make undertakers and tailors, as neighbors, unimportant!  On the rear of the house was an iron veranda—­roped with wistaria; below, inclosed in a crumbling brick wall, was the