The shingling, begun joyously by the big boy and the little girl on Monday, promised several delightfully busy mornings.... Of course the setting out for Mercer had been postponed; there was no possibility of moving Eleanor for the present; so Maurice's "business career," as he called it, with grinning pomposity, had to be delayed--Eleanor turned white at the mere suggestion of convalascing at Green Hill without him! Consequently Maurice, when not worshiping his wife, had nothing to do, and Edith had seized the opportunity to make him useful.... "We'll shingle my henhouse," she had announced. Maurice liked the scheme as much as she did. The September air, the smell of the fresh shingles, the sitting with one leg doubled under you, and the other outstretched on the hot slope of the roof, the tap-tapping of the hammers, the bossing of Edith, the trying to talk of Eleanor, and thunderstorms, while you hold eight nails between your lips; then the pause while Edith climbs down the ladder and runs to the kitchen for hot cookies; all these things would be a delightful occupation for any intelligent person! "It'll take three mornings to do it," Edith said, importantly; and Maurice said: "It will, because you keep putting the wrong end up! I wish Eleanor was well enough to do it," he said--and then burst into self-derisive chuckles: "Imagine Eleanor straddling that ridgepole! It would scare her stiff!" It was after this talk that Maurice "backed out" on the job--but Edith never knew why. She saw no connection between the unfinished roof, and the fact that that same afternoon, sitting on the floor in the Bride's room, she had, in her anxiety to be entertaining, repeated Maurice's remark about the ridgepole. Eleanor, who had had an empty morning, listening to the distant tapping of hammers, had drooped a weary lip. "I should hate it. Horrid, dirty work!" "Oh no! It's nice, clean work," Edith corrected her. "But _you_ wouldn't like it, of course," she said, with satisfaction; "you'd be scared! You're scared of everything, Maurice says. You were scared to death, up on the mountain." Eleanor was silent. "He thinks it's lovely for you to be scared; it's funny about Maurice," said Edith, thoughtfully; "he doesn't like it when _I'm_ scared--not that I ever am, now, but I used to be when I was a child." The color flickered on Eleanor's cheeks: "Edith, I'll rest now," she said; her voice broke. Edith looked at her, open-mouthed. "Why, Eleanor!" she said; "what's the matter? Are you mad at anything? Have you a stomachache? I'll run for mother!" "There's nothing the matter. But--but I wish you'd tell Maurice to come and speak to me." Edith tore downstairs, and out of the front door: "Maurice! Where are you?"--then, catching sight of him, reading and smoking in a hammock slung between two of the big columns on the east porch, she rushed at him, and pulled him to his astonished feet. "Eleanor wants you! Something's the matter, and--"