a thin lawn for the hot days, and the pale slenderness of her arms and neck were revealed by the thinness of the fabric—went to school, she knew, the very moment that Miss Ida Slome greeted her, that Aunt Maria had been right in her surmise. For the first time since she had been to school, Miss Slome, who was radiant in a flowered muslin, came up to her and embraced her. Maria submitted coldly to the embrace.
“You sweet little thing,” said Miss Slome.
There was a man principal of the school, but Miss Slome was first assistant, and Maria was in most of her classes. She took her place, with her pretty smile as set as if she had been a picture instead of a living and breathing woman, on the platform.
“You are awful sweet all of a sudden, ain't you?” said Gladys Mann in Maria's ear.
Maria nodded, and went to her own seat.
All that day she noted, with her sharp little consciousness, the change in Miss Slome's manner towards her. It was noticeable even in class. “It is true,” she said to herself. “Father is going to marry her.”
Aunt Maria was a little pacified by Harry's rejoinder the night before. She begun to wonder if she had been, by any chance, mistaken.
“Maybe I was wrong,” she said, privately, to Maria. But Maria shook her head.
“She called me a sweet little thing, and kissed me,” said she.
“Didn't she ever before?”
“No, ma'am.”
“Well, she may have taken a notion to. Maybe I was mistaken. The way your father spoke last night sort of made me think so.”
Aunt Maria made up her mind that if Harry was out late the next Sunday, and the next Wednesday, that would be a test of the situation. The first time had been Wednesday, and Wednesday and Sunday, in all provincial localities, are the acknowledged courting nights. Of course it sometimes happens that an ardent lover goes every night; but Harry Edgham, being an older man and a widower, would probably not go to that extent.
He soon did, however. Very soon Maria and her aunt went to bed every night before Harry came home, and Miss Ida Slome became more loving towards Maria.
Wollaston Lee, boy as he was, child as he was, really suffered. He lost flesh, and his mother told Aunt Maria that she was really worried about him. “He doesn't eat enough to keep a bird alive,” said she.
It never entered into her heart to imagine that Wollaston was in love with the teacher, a woman almost if not quite old enough to be his mother, and was suffering because of her love for Harry Edgham.
One afternoon, when Harry's courtship of Ida Slome had been going on for about six weeks, and all Edgham was well informed concerning it, Maria, instead of going straight home from school, took a cross-road through some woods. She dreaded to reach home that night. It was Wednesday, and her father would be sure to go to see Miss Slome. Maria felt an indefinable depression, as if she, little, helpless girl, were being carried so far into the wheels of life that it was too much for her. Her father, of late, had been kinder than ever to her; Maria had begun to wonder if she ought not to be glad if he were happy, and if she ought not to try to love Miss Slome. But this afternoon depression overcame her. She walked slowly between the fields, which were white and gold with queen's-lace and golden-rod. Her slender shoulders were bent a little. She walked almost like an old woman. She heard a quick step behind her, and Wollaston Lee came up beside her. She looked at him with some sentiment, even in the midst of her depression. The thought flashed across her mind, what is she should marry Wollaston at the same time her father married Miss Slome? That would be a happy and romantic solution of the affair. She colored sweetly, and smiled, but the boy scowled at her.
“Say?” he said.
Maria trembled a little. She was surprised.
“What?” she asked.
“Your father is the meanest man in this town, he is the meanest in New Jersey, he is the meanest man in the whole United States, he is the meanest man in the whole world.”
Again the boy scowled at Maria, who did not understand; but she would not have her father reviled.
“He isn't, so there!” she said.
“He's going to marry teacher.”
“I don't see as he is mean if he is,” said Maria, forced into justice by injustice.
“I was going to marry her myself, if she'd only waited, and he hadn't butted in,” said Wollaston.
The boy gave one last scowl at the little girl, and it was as if he scowled at all womanhood in her. Then he gave a fling away, and ran like a wild thing across the field of golden-rod and queen's-lace. Maria, watching, saw him throw himself down prone in the midst of the wild-flowers, and she understood that he was crying because the teacher was going to marry her father. She went on, walking like a little old woman, and she had a feeling as if she had found a road in the world that led outside all love.
Chapter VI
Maria felt that she no longer cared about Wollaston Lee, that she fairly scorned him. Then, suddenly, something occurred to her. She turned, and ran back as fast as she could, her short fleece of golden hair flying. She wrapped her short skirts about her, and wormed through the barbed-wire fence which skirted the field—the boy had leaped it, but she was not equal to that—and she hastened, leaving a furrow through the white-and-gold herbage, to the boy lying on his face weeping. She stood over him.
“Say?” said she.
The boy gave a convulsive wriggle of his back and shoulders, and uttered an inarticulate “Let me alone”; but the girl persisted.
“Say?” said she again.
Then the boy turned, and disclosed a flushed, scowling face among the flowers.
“Well, what do you want, anyway?” said he.
“If you want to marry Miss Slome, why don't you, instead of my father?” inquired Maria, bluntly, going straight to the point.
“I haven't got any money,” replied Wollaston, crossly; “all a woman thinks of is money. How'd I buy her dresses?”
“I don't believe but your father would be willing for you to live at home with her, and buy her dresses, till you got so you could earn yourself.”
“She wouldn't have me,” said the boy, and he fairly dug his flushed face into the mass of wild-flowers.
“You are a good deal younger than father,” said Maria.
“Your father he can give her a diamond ring, and I haven't got more'n forty cents, and I don't believe that would buy much of anything,” said Wollaston, in muffled tones of grief and rage.
Maria felt a shock at the idea of a diamond ring. Her mother had never owned one.
“Oh, I don't believe father will ever give her a diamond ring in the world,” said she.
“She's wearing one, anyhow—I saw it,” said Wollaston. “Where did she get
