"You can take him,--old Rover's gone to heaven. Think you can start to-morrow?" He sat down beside her and took her hand in his warm young paw; the pity of her made him frown--pity, and an intolerable annoyance at himself! She, a woman twice his age, had married him, when, of course, she ought to have told him not to be a little fool; "...wiped my nose and sent me home!" he thought, with cynical humor. But, all the same, she loved him. And he had played her a damned cheap trick!--which was hidden safely away in the two-family house on Ash Street. "Hidden." What a detestable word! It flashed into Maurice's mind that if, that night among the stars, he had made a clean breast of it all to Eleanor, he wouldn't now be going through this business of hiding things--and covering them up by innumerable, squalid little falsenesses. "There would have been a bust-up, and she might have left me. But that would have been the end of it!" he thought; he would have been _free_ from what he had once compared to a dead hen tied around a dog's neck--the clinging corruption of a lie! The Truth would have made him free. Aloud, he said, "Star,"--she caught her breath at the old lovely word--"I'll go to Green Hill with you, and take care of you for a few days. I'm sure I can fix it up at the office." The tears leaped to her eyes. "Oh, Maurice!" she said; "I haven't been nice to you. I'm afraid I'm--rather temperamental. I--I get to fancying things. One day last week I--had horrid thoughts about you." "About _me_?" he said, laughing; "well, no doubt I deserved 'em!" "No!" she said, passionately; "no--you didn't! I know you didn't. But I--" With the melody of that old name in her ears, her thoughts were too shameful to be confessed. She wouldn't tell him how she had wronged him in her mind; she would just say: "Don't keep things from me, darling! Be frank with me, Maurice. And--" she stopped and tried to laugh, but her mournful eyes dredged his to find an indorsement of her own certainties--"and tell me you don't love anybody else?" She held her breath for his answer: "You _bet_ I don't!" The humor of such a question almost made him laugh. In his own mind he was saying, "Lily, and _Love_? Good Lord!" Eleanor, putting her hand on his, said, in a whisper, "But we have no children. Do you mind--very much?" "Great Scott! no. Don't worry about _that_. That's the last thing I think of! Now, when do you think you can start?" He spoke with wearied but determined gentleness. She did not detect the weariness,--the gentleness made her so happy; he called her "Star"! He said he didn't love anyone else! He said he didn't mind because they had no children.... Oh, how dreadful for her to have had those shameful fears--and out in "their meadow," too! It was sacrilege.... Aloud, she said she could be ready by the first of the week; "And you'll stay with me? Can't you take two weeks?" she entreated. "Oh, I can't afford _that_" he said; "but I guess I can manage one...."