"Good heavens, no!" said Mr. Houghton, with an alarmed look; "_of course_ she isn't! What put such an idea into your head?" And as Buster and her squirming prize departed, he told his Mary that her daughter was destroying his nervous system. "She'll repeat that to Eleanor," he groaned. His wife had no sympathy for him; "You deserve anything you may get!" she said, severely; and proceeded to write to Eleanor to make her proposition. If they cared to take Edith, she said, they could hire a house and stop boarding--"which is dreadful for both of your digestions; and I will be glad if this plan appeals to you, to feel that Edith is with anyone who has such gentle manners as you." Eleanor, reading the friendly words at the boarding-house breakfast table, said quickly to herself, "I don't want her... She would monopolize Maurice!" Then she hesitated; "He would be more comfortable in a house of his own... But Edith? Oh, I _don't_ want her!" She turned to show the letter to Maurice, but he was sitting sidewise, one arm over the back of his chair, in vociferous discussion with a fellow boarder. "No, sir!" he was declaring; "if they revise the rules again, they'll revise the guts out of the whole blessed game; they'll make it all muscle and no mind." "But football isn't any intellectual stunt," the other boarder insisted. "It _is_--to a degree. The old flying wedge--" "Maurice!" Eleanor said again; but Maurice, impassioned about "rules," didn't even hear her. She gave his arm a little friendly shake. "Maurice! You are the limit, with your old football!" He turned, laughing, and took the letter from her hand. As he read it, his face changed sharply. "But Fern Hill is in Medfield!" he exclaimed. "I suppose she could take the trolley almost to the school grounds," Eleanor conceded, reluctantly. "Why can't she live out there? It's a boarding school, isn't it?" (She might meet Lily on the car!) For a moment she accepted his decision with relief; then the thought of his comfort urged her: "I know of an awfully attractive house, with a garden. Little Bingo could hide his bones in it." "No," he said, sharply; "it wouldn't do. I don't want her." Instantly Eleanor was buoyantly ready to have Edith ... he "_didn't want her_!" When Maurice rose from the table she went to the front door with him, detaining him--until the pretty school-teacher was well on her way down the street;--with tender charges to take care of himself. Then, in the darkness of the hall, with Maurice very uneasy lest some one might see them, she kissed him good-by. "If we could afford to keep house without taking Edith," she said, "I'd rather not have her. (Kiss me again--no-body's looking!) But we can't. So let's have her."