"Ten minutes in a rowboat," he said,--"and _this_!" One of the hens clucked. "I'll fight," he said. "Lots of men come up against this sort of thing, and they hand the whole rotten business over to a lawyer. I'll fight. Or I'll move.... Perhaps that's the best way? I'll just tell Eleanor we've got to live in New York. Damn it! she'd ask why? I'll say I have a job there. Lily'd never be able to find me in New York." The moon slipped out below the pine, and hung for a dim moment in the haze. Maurice's mind went through a long and involved plan of concealing his address from Lily when he moved to New York.... "But what would we live on while I was finding a job?" ... Suddenly thought stopped short; he just watched the moon, and listened to a muffled stir among the hens. Then he took out his knife, and began to cut little notches on the window sill. "I'll fight," he said, mechanically. There were running steps on the gravel path, and instantly he was on his feet. He had the presence of mind to put his hand into a nest, so that when Edith came in she reproached him for getting ahead of her in collecting eggs. "How many have you got? Two? Griselda was on the nest when I started up the mountain, but I thought there was another egg there?" "Only one," he said, thickly, and handed it to her. "Come on in the house," Edith commanded; "I suppose," she said, resignedly, "Eleanor is playing on the piano!" (Edith, as her adoration of Eleanor lessened, was frankly bored by her music.) "All right," Maurice said, and followed her. Edith asked no questions; Maurice's "word" on the road had sobered her too much for talk. "He's mad about something," she thought; "but I never heard Maurice say--_that_!" She didn't quite like to repeat what he had said, though Johnny had confessed to saying "part of it." "I don't believe he ever did," Edith thought; "he's putting on airs! But for Maurice to say _all_ of it!--that was wrong," said Edith, gravely. They went out of the henhouse together in silence. Maurice was saying to himself, "I might not be able to get a job in New York... I'll fight." Yet certain traditional decencies, slowly emerging from the welter of his rage and terror, made him add, "If it was mine, I'd have to give her something... But it isn't. I'll fight." He was so absorbed that before he knew it he had followed Edith to the studio, where, in the twilight. Mr. and Mrs. Houghton were sitting on the sofa together, hand in hand, and Eleanor was at the piano singing, softly, old songs that her hosts loved. "If," said Henry Houghton, listening, "heaven is any better than this, I shall consider it needless extravagance on the part of the Almighty,"--and he held his wife's hand against his lips. Maurice, at the door, turned away and would have gone upstairs, but Mr. Houghton called out: "Sit down, man! If _I_ had the luck to have a wife who could sing, I'd keep her at it! Sit down!" Eleanor's voice, lovely and noble and serene, went on: