They played, neither of them with much zest, and both of them with glances toward the road. The walloping was fairly divided; but it was Maurice who gave out first, and said he had to go home. ("Eleanor'll be hunting for me, the first thing I know," he thought.) "Tell Edith I'll come over to-night," Johnny called after him. "I'm not carrying _billets-doux_," Maurice retorted. "I suppose," he thought, listlessly, "it will be a short engagement." He went home by the path through the woods, and halfway back Edith met him--the shining hair dried, but inclined to tumble over her ears, so that her hat slipped about on her head. She said: "Johnny lick you?" "Johnny? No! He's not up to it!" They both grinned, and Maurice sat down on a wayside log to put a knot in a broken shoestring. Edith sat down, too, trying to keep her hat on, and cursing (she said) the unreliability of her hair. The shoestring mended, Maurice batted a tall fern with his racket. "Eleanor's sort of forlorn, Maurice?" Edith said. "Generally is." He slashed at the fern, and she heard him sigh. "That time she dragged me down the mountain took it out of her." Edith nodded; then she said, with her straight look: "You're a perfect lamb, Maurice! You are awfully"--she wanted to say "patient," but there was an implication in that; so she said, lamely--"nice to Eleanor." "The Lord knows I ought to be!" he said, cynically. "Yes; she just about killed herself to save you," Edith agreed. "Oh, not because of that!" The misery in his voice startled her; she said, quickly, "How do you mean, Maurice? I don't understand." "I ought to be 'nice' to her." "But you are! You are!" "I'm not." "Maurice, I'm awfully fond of Eleanor; you won't think I'm finding fault, or anything? But sometimes, when she doesn't feel very well, she--you--I mean, you really _are_ a lamb, Maurice!" Edith was twenty that summer--a strong, gay creature; but her old, ridiculous, incorrigible candor (and that honest kiss in the darkness!) made her still a child to Maurice.... Yet Johnny Bennett was going to marry her!... Maurice rested his chin on his left fist, and batted the fern; then he said: "I've been infernally mean to Eleanor. It's little enough to be 'nice,' as you call it, now." She flew to his defense. "Talk sense! You never did a mean thing in your life." His shrug fired her into a frankness which she regretted the next minute. "Maurice, you are too good for Eleanor--or anybody," she ended, hastily. He gave her a look of entreaty for understanding--though he knew, he thought, that in her ignorance of life she couldn't understand even if she had been told! Yet for the mere relief of speaking, he skirted the ugly truth: "I can't be too patient with her when she's forlorn, because I--I haven't played the game with her." "It's up to her to forgive that!" "She doesn't know it." "Maurice! You haven't a secret from Eleanor?"