Maurice looked worried. "I hate to urge anything you don't like, Nelly; but I really do feel we ought to accept their invitation? And you'll like them! Of course they're not in your class. Nobody is! I mean they're old, and sort of commonplace. But we can go and live in the woods most of the time, and get away from them,--except little Skeezics. We'll take her along. You'll love having her; she's lots of fun. You see, I've _got_ to go to Green Hill, because I must get in touch with Uncle Henry; I've got to find out about our income!" he explained, with a broad grin. "I should think Edith would bore you," she said. Her voice was so sharply irritated that Maurice looked at her, open-mouthed; he was too bewildered to speak. "Why, Eleanor," he faltered; "why are you--on your ear? Was it what I told you about Edith? You didn't think that she wasn't _proper_?" "No! Of course not! It wasn't _that_." She came quickly and knelt beside him. "Of course it wasn't _that_! It was--" She could not say what it was; perhaps she did not quite know that her annoyance at Maurice's delight in Edith was the inarticulate pain of recognizing that he might have more in common with a child, eight years his junior, than he could have with a woman twenty years his senior. Her eyes were suddenly bright with frightened tears. In a whisper, that fear which, in these days of complete belief in her own happiness, she had forgotten even to deny, came back: "What really upset me was the letters. The Houghtons are angry because I am--" she flinched, and would not utter the final word which was the hidden reason of her annoyance at Edith; so, instead of uttering it, she said, "because we eloped." As for Maurice, he rallied her, and pretended to scold her, and tasted her tears salt upon his lips. He felt very old and protecting. "Nonsense!" he said. "Mrs. Houghton and Uncle Henry are old, and of course they can't understand love. But the romance of it will touch them!" And again Love cast out Fear; Eleanor, her face hidden on his shoulder, told herself that it really didn't matter what the Houghtons thought of ... an elopement. CHAPTER V The cloud of their first difference had blown over almost before they felt its shadow, and the sky of love was as clear as the lucid beryl of the summer night. Yet even the passing shadow of the cloud kept both the woman and the boy repentant and a little frightened; he, because he thought he had offended her by some lack of delicacy; she, because she thought she had shocked him by what he might think was harshness to a child. Even a week afterward, as they journeyed up to Green Hill in a dusty accommodation train, there was an uneasy memory of that cloud--black with Maurice's dullness, and livid with the zigzag flash of Eleanor's irritation--and then the little shower of tears! ... What had brought the cloud? Would it ever return? ... As for those twenty dividing years, they never thought of them!