"Too bad!" her husband sympathized. In the parlor, after dinner, while Eleanor was getting out the cards for solitaire, Maurice, tingling with alarm and irritation, sat down at the piano and banged out all sorts of chords and discords. "Lily'll _have_ to move," he was saying to himself. (Bang--_Bang!_) His Imagination raced with the possibilities of what would have happened if Eleanor had found the house which was "like all the other houses," and heard his "good-by" to Lily, or perhaps even caught the latest addition to Jacky's vocabulary! "The jig would have been up," he thought. (Bang--Crash!)... "She'll _have_ to move! Suppose Eleanor took it into her head to hunt her up? She's capable of it!" (Crash!) Eleanor's absorption in the cook she could not find kept her for nearly forty-eight hours from speculation as to what, if not office business, took Maurice to Medfield. When she did begin to speculate she said to herself, "He doesn't tell me things about his business!" Then she was stabbed again by his annoyance because she had opened the letter from Mr. Houghton; then by his secretiveness in regard to that adventure on the river with Mrs. Morton. (He had told Edith!) Then this--then that--and by and by a tiny heap of nothings, that implied reserves. He wasn't confidential. She told him _everything_! She never kept a thing from him! And he didn't even tell her why he was over in Medfield when no real-estate matters took him there. Why should he _not_ tell her? And when she said that, the inevitable answer came: He didn't tell her, because he didn't want her to know! Perhaps he had friends there? No. No friends of Maurice's could live in such a locality. Well, perhaps there was some woman? Even as she said this, she was ashamed. She knew she didn't believe it. Of course there wasn't any woman!... But, at any rate, he had interests in Medfield that he did not tell her about. She hinted this to him at breakfast the next morning. She had not meant to speak of it; she knew she would be sorry if she did. Eleanor was incapable of analysis, but she was, in her pitiful way, aware that jealousy, _when articulate_, is almost always vulgar--perhaps because the decorums of breeding (which insist that, for the sake of others, one's own pain must be hidden) are not propped up by the reserves of pride. At any rate, she was not often publicly bitter to Maurice. This time, however, she was. "Apparently," she said, "Maurice has acquaintances on Maple Street whom I don't know." "The elite," Edith remarked, facetiously; "his lovely Mrs. Dale lives there." Maurice's start was perceptible. "Perhaps it was Mrs. Dale you went to see?" Eleanor said. Maurice, trained in these years of furtiveness to self-control, said, "Does she live on Maple Street, Edith?" "I guess so. The time I rescued her little boy and her flower pot, ages ago, she was going into a house on Maple Street."