"See here, what are you talking about?"

The uneasy color sprang into Maurice's face, he stood still, and the
grin disappeared. When he said explicitly what he was "talking about,"
Mr. Bradley's angry consternation was like the unexpected snap of the
old dog; it made Eleanor's husband feel like the puppy. "I ought to have
rounded him up," Mr. Bradley was saying to himself; "Houghton will hold
me responsible!" And even while making unpleasant remarks to the
bridegroom, he was composing, in his mind, a letter to Mr. Houghton
about the helplessness incidental to a broken leg, which accounted for
his failure in "rounding up." "_I_ couldn't get on to his trail!" he was
exonerating himself.

When Maurice retreated, looking like a schoolboy, it took him
a perceptible time to regain his sense of age and pride and
responsibility. He rushed back to the hotel--where he had plunged into
the extravagance of the "bridal suite,"--to pour out his hurt feelings
to Eleanor, and while she looked at him in one of her lovely silences he
railed at Bradley, and said the trouble with him was that he was sore
about money! "He needn't worry! I'll pay him," Maurice said, largely.
And then forgot Bradley in the rapture of kissing Eleanor's hand. "As
if we cared for his opinion!" he said.

"We don't care!" she said, joyously. Her misgivings had vanished like
dew in the hot sun. Old Mrs. O'Brien had done her part in dissipating
them. While Maurice was bearding his tutor, Eleanor had gone across
town to her laundress's, to ask if Mrs. O'Brien would take Bingo as a
boarder--. "I can't have him at the hotel," she explained, and then
told the great news:--"I'm going to live there, because I--I'm
married,"--upon which she was kissed, and blessed, and wept over! "The