She began to say no, she couldn't manage it; "I--I can't leave Bingo" (she was hunting for an excuse not to leave Maurice), "Bingo is so miserable if I am out of his sight."
"You can take him,--old Rover's gone to heaven. Think you can start to-morrow?" He sat down beside her and took her hand in his warm young paw; the pity of her made him frown--pity, and an intolerable annoyance at himself! She, a woman twice his age, had married him, when, of course, she ought to have told him not to be a little fool; "...wiped my nose and sent me home!" he thought, with cynical humor. But, all the same, she loved him. And he had played her a damned cheap trick!--which was hidden safely away in the two-family house on Ash Street. "Hidden." What a detestable word! It flashed into Maurice's mind that if, that night among the stars, he had made a clean breast of it all to Eleanor, he wouldn't now be going through this business of hiding things--and covering them up by innumerable, squalid little falsenesses. "There would have been a bust-up, and she might have left me. But that would have been the end of it!" he thought; he would have been _free_ from what he had once compared to a dead hen tied around a dog's neck--the clinging corruption of a lie! The Truth would have made him free. Aloud, he said, "Star,"--she caught her breath at the old lovely word--"I'll go to Green Hill with you, and take care of you for a few days. I'm sure I can fix it up at the office."
The tears leaped to her eyes. "Oh, Maurice!" she said; "I haven't been nice to you. I'm afraid I'm--rather temperamental. I--I get to fancying things. One day last week I--had horrid thoughts about you."
"About _me_?" he said, laughing; "well, no doubt I deserved 'em!"
"No!" she said, passionately; "no--you didn't! I know you didn't. But I--" With the melody of that old name in her ears, her thoughts were too shameful to be confessed. She wouldn't tell him how she had wronged him in her mind; she would just say: "Don't keep things from me, darling! Be frank with me, Maurice. And--" she stopped and tried to laugh, but her mournful eyes dredged his to find an indorsement of her own certainties--"and tell me you don't love anybody else?"