"Hello!" she called out, in cheerful gasps; "thought we'd come up and walk home with you!" "'Lo," Maurice said. The boy and girl achieving the rocky knoll on which Maurice was sitting, his hands locked about his knees, his eyes angry and ashamed, staring over the treetops, sat down beside him. Johnny pulled out his pipe, and Edith took off her hat and fanned herself. "Mother and Eleanor went for a ride. I thought I'd rather come up here." "Um--" Maurice said. "Two letters for you," she said. "Eleanor told me to bring 'em up. Might be business." As she handed them to him, his eye caught the address on one of them, and a little cold tingle suddenly ran down his spine. Lily had never written to him, but some instinct warned him that that cramped handwriting on the narrow lavender envelope, forwarded from the office, could only be hers. A whiff of perfumery made him sure. He had a pang of fright. At what? He could not have said; but even before he opened the purple envelope he knew the taste of fear in his mouth.... Sitting there on the mountain, looking down into the misty serenities of the sun-drenched valley, with the smoke of Johnny Bennett's pipe in his nostrils, and the friendly Edith beside him, he tore open the scented envelope, and as his eyes fell on the first lines it seemed as if the spreading world below rose up and hit him in the face: DEAR FRIEND CURT,--I don't know what you'll say. I hope you won't be mad. I'm going to have a baby. _It's yours_.... Maurice could not see the page, a wave of nausea swamped even his horror; he swallowed--swallowed--swallowed. Edith heard him gasp, and looked at him, much interested. "What's the matter with your hands?" Edith inquired. "Johnny! Look at his hands!" Maurice's fingers, smoothing out the purple sheet, were shaking so that the paper rustled. He did not hear her. Then he read the whole thing through to its laconic end: _It's yours_--honest to God. Can you help me a little? Sorry to trouble you on your vacation. Your friend, LILY. "What _is_ the matter with your hands?" Edith said, very much interested. CHAPTER XI When, a year after his marriage, Maurice began to awaken to Eleanor's realities, maturity had come to him with a bound. But it was almost age that fell upon him when Lily's realities confronted him. In the late afternoon, as he and Edith and the silent Johnny walked down the mountain, he was dizzy with terror of Lily! _She was blackmailing him._