"I'll tell you what not to do--spoil my new canvas! If you _really_ want my advice:--tell Eleanor that the greatest compliment any husband can pay his wife is contained in four words: 'You never bore me'; and that if she isn't careful Maurice will never compliment her." Down in the garden, no one was aware of any tragedy. "When I go to Fern Hill," Edith said, "I'm going to tell all the girls _I know Eleanor_! I'm 'ordinary,' too, beside her. And so is mother." Maurice agreed. "We are all crude, compared to her." Edith sighed with joy; if she had had any inclination to be contemptuous of Eleanor's timidity, it vanished when it was pointed out to her that it was really a sign of the Bride's infinite superiority.... So the three Houghtons accepted--one with amused pity, and the other with concern, and the third with admiration of such super-refinement,--the fact that Eleanor was a coward. Yet if she had not been a coward, something she did would not have been particularly brave, nor would it have wrung from Mary Houghton the admission: "I _like_ her!" The conquering incident happened in August. The hut up in the woods meant to Maurice and Edith and Johnny that eager grasping at hardship with which Age has no sympathy, but which is the very essence of Youth. Within a week of her arrival at Green Hill, Eleanor (who did not like hardship;) had been carried off for a day of eating smoky food, cooked on a camp fire, and watching cloud shadows drift across the valley and up and over the hills; she had wondered, silently, why Maurice liked this very tiring sort of thing?--and especially why he liked to have Edith go along! "A child of her age is such a nuisance," Eleanor thought. But he did like it, all of it!--the fatigue, and the smoke, and the grubby food--and Edith!--he liked it so much that, just before the time set for their departure for Mercer--and the position in a real-estate office, which had been secured for Maurice--he said: "Nelly, let's camp out up in the cabin for our last week, all by ourselves!" Edith's face fell, and so, for that matter, did the Bride's. Edith said, "By yourselves? Not Johnny and me, too?" And Eleanor said, "_At night?_ Oh, Maurice!" "It will be beautiful," he said; "there'll be a moon next week, and we'll sit up there and look down into the valley, and see the treetops lift up out of the mist--like islands from the foam of 'faerylands forlorn'! You'll love it." "I'm crazy about camping," said Edith, eagerly;--and waited for an invitation, which was not forthcoming. Instead, Maurice, talking his plans over with her, made it quite clear that her room was better than her company. It was Edith's first experience in being left out, and it sobered her a little; but she swallowed the affront with her usual good sense: "I guess he likes Eleanor more 'an me, so, 'course, it's nice to be by himself with her."