Maurice aged ten years in that first winter of rigid and unexplainable penuriousness, and of a secrecy which meant perilous skirtings of downright lying; for Eleanor occasionally asked why they had so little money to spend? He had requested a raise--and not mentioned to Eleanor the fact that he had got it. When she complained because his salary was so low, he told her Weston was paying him all he was worth, and he _wouldn't_ strike for more! "So it's impossible to go to housekeeping," he said--for of course she continued to urge housekeeping, saying that she couldn't understand why they had to be so economical! But he refused, patiently. To be patient, Maurice did not need, now, to remind himself of the mountain and her faithfulness to him; he had only to remind himself of the yellow-brick apartment house, and his faithlessness to her. "I've got to be kind, or I'd be a skunk," he used to think. So he was very kind. He did not burst out at her with irritated mortification when she telephoned to the office to know if "Mr. Curtis's headache was better";--he had suffered so much that he had gone beyond the self-consciousness of mortification;--and he walked with her in the park on Sunday afternoons to exercise Bingo; and on their anniversary he sat beside her in the grass, under the locust tree, and watched the river--their river, which had brought Lily into his life!--and listened to the lovely voice: "O thou with dewy locks who lookest down!" CHAPTER XIII The next fall, however, the boarding did come to an end, and they went to housekeeping. It was Mrs. Houghton who brought this about. Edith was to enter Fern Hill School in the fall, and her mother had an inspiration: "Let her board with Eleanor and Maurice! The trolley goes right out to Medfield, and it will be very convenient for her. Also, it will help them with expenses," Mrs. Houghton said, comfortably. "But why can't she live at the school?" Edith's father objected, with a troubled look; somehow, he did not like the idea of his girl in that pathetic household, which was at once so conscious and so unconscious of its own instability! "Why does she have to be with Eleanor and Maurice?" Henry Houghton said. "Eleanor has the refinement that a hobbledehoy like Edith needs," Mrs. Houghton explained; "and I think the child will have better food than at Fern Hill. School food is always horrid." "But won't Eleanor's dullness afflict Buster?" he said, doubtfully; then--because at that moment Edith banged into the room to show her shuddering mother a garter snake she had captured--he added, with complacent subtlety, "as for food, I, personally, prefer a dinner of herbs with an _interesting_ woman, than a stalled ox and Eleanor." Which caused Edith to say, "Is Eleanor uninteresting, father?"