been "silly"! Had she been well--instead of lying there in her bed,
white and strained and trembling, all because she had saved his life,
harnessing herself to that wagon, and bringing him, in the darkness,
through a thousand terrors--nonexistent, to be sure, but none the less
real--to safety and life! Oh, how could he have even thought the word
"silly"? He was ashamed and humble; never again would he be cross to
her! "Silly? I'm the silly one! I'm an ass. I'll tell her so! I don't
suppose she'll ever forgive me. She said I 'didn't understand her';
well, I didn't! But she'll never have cause to say it again! I
understand her now," Then, once more, he thought, frowning, "But why is
she so down on Edith?"

That Eleanor's irritation was jealousy--not of Edith, but of Edith's
years--never occurred to him. So all he said was, "She oughtn't to be
down on Edith; _she_ has always appreciated her!" Edith had never said
that Eleanor was "silly"! But so long as it bothered Eleanor (being
nervous) to have the imp round, he'd tell her not to be a nuisance. "You
can say anything to Skeezics; she has sense. She understands."

But all the same, Maurice shingled his part of the henhouse before
breakfast.

Maurice did not call Eleanor "silly" again for a long time. There was
always--when she was unreasonable--the curbing memory that her
reasonableness had been shaken by that assault of darkness and fear, and
the terrible fatigue of saving his robust young life. Furthermore,
Doctor Bennett--telling Henry Houghton that Eleanor had done the worst
possible thing, "magnificently"--told Maurice she had "nervous
prostration,"--a cloaking phrase which kindly doctors often give to
perplexed husbands, so that the egotism of sickly wives may be covered