"Oh, come along!" said Mrs. Houghton. And Eleanor yielded, scolding
happily while she pinned her hat on before the mirror in the hall.

In the orchard they picked up some apples, then sat down on the bleached
stubble of the mowed hillside and looked over at the dark mass of the
mountain, behind which a red sun was trampling waist deep through leaden
clouds. "How _can_ I bring it in?" Mrs. Houghton thought; "it won't do
to just throw a warning at her!"

But she didn't have to throw it; Eleanor invited it. "I'm glad we're
going to the hotel, just at first," she said; "Auntie says I don't know
anything about keeping house, and I get worried for fear I won't make
Maurice comfortable. I tell him so all the time!"

"I wouldn't put things into his head, Eleanor," Mrs. Houghton said
(beginning her "warning"); "I mean things that you don't want him to
feel. I remember when my first baby was coming--the little boy we
lost--" she stopped and bit her lip; the "baby" had been gone for
nearly twenty years, but he was still her little boy--"I was very
forlorn, and I couldn't do anything, or go anywhere; and Henry stayed at
home with me like a saint. Well, I told my father that I had told Henry
it was hard on him to 'sit at home with an invalid wife.' And father
said, 'If you tell him so often enough, he'll agree with you,' There's a
good deal in that, Eleanor?"

"I suppose there is," Maurice's wife said, vaguely.

"So, if I were you," Mrs. Houghton said, still feeling her way, "I
wouldn't give him the idea that you are any--well, older than he is. A
wife might be fifty years older than her husband, and if her _spirit_