He entered No. 16 without turning the clanging bell, for the door was ajar. Lily was in the entry, talking to the doctor, who gave Mrs. Dale's "friend" a rather keen look. "Oh, Mr. Curtis, he's awful sick!" Lily said; she was haggard with fright.
Maurice, swearing to himself for having arrived at that particular moment, said, coldly, "Too bad."
"Oh, we'll pull him through," the doctor said, with a kind look at Lily. She caught his hand and kissed it, and burst out crying. The two men looked at each other—one amused, the other shrinking with disgust at his own moral squalor. Then from the floor above came a whimpering cry, and Lily, calling passionately, "Yes, Sweety! Maw's coming!" flew upstairs.
"I'll look in this evening," Doctor Nelson said, and took himself off, rubbing the back of his hand on his trousers. "I wonder if there's any funny business there?" he reflected. But he thought no more about it until weeks afterward, when he happened, one day, in the bank, to stand before Maurice, waiting his turn at the teller's window. He said, "Hello!" and Maurice said, "Hello!" and added that it was a cold day. The fact that Maurice said not a word about that recovering little patient in Medfield made the doctor's mind revert to the possibilities he had recognized in Lily's entry.
"Yet he looks too decent for that sort of thing," the doctor thought; "well, it's a rum world." Then Maurice took his turn at the window, and Doctor Nelson put his notes in his pocket, and the two men nodded to each other, and said, "By," and went their separate ways.
CHAPTER XIV
Edith's first winter in Mercer went pretty well; she was not fussy about what she had to eat; "I can always stoke on bread and butter," she said, cheerfully; and she was patient with the aging Bingo's yapping jealousies; "The smaller a dog is, the more jealous he is!" she said, with good-humored contempt; and she didn't mind Eleanor's speechlessness. "I talk!" Edith said. But Maurice?... "I love him next to father and mother," Edith thought; but, all the same, she didn't know what to make of Maurice! He had very little to say to her—which made her feel annoyingly young, and made him seem so old and stern that sometimes she could hardly realize that he was the Maurice of the henhouse, and the camp, and the squabbles. Instead, he was the Maurice of that night on the river, the "Sir Walter Raleigh" Maurice! Once in a while she was quite shy with him. "He's awfully handsome," she thought, and her eyes dreamed. "What a clod Johnny is, compared to him!" ... As for Eleanor, Edith, being as unobservant as most sixteen-year-old girls, saw only the lovely dark eyes and the beautiful brow under the ripple of soft black hair, Eleanor's sterile silences did not trouble her, and she never knew that the traces of tears meant a helpless consciousness that dinner had been a failure. The fact was, she never noticed Eleanor's looks! She merely thought Maurice's wife was old, and didn't "get much fun out of life—she just plays on the piano!" Edith thought. Pain of mind or body was, to Edith—as probably it ought to be to Youth—unintelligible; so she had no sympathy. In fact, being sixteen, she had still the hard heart of a child.
It may have been the remembrance of Sir Walter Raleigh that made her, one night, burst into reminiscent questions:
"Maurice! Do you remember the time that boat upset, and that girl—all painted, you know—flopped around in the water?"