rming
little voice.

"Oh, very. She lives on a hundred dollars a year."

"Will you get enough to eat?" asked Evelyn, anxiously.

"Oh yes. I shall pay her four dollars a week, and if she got along
with only a hundred a year, only think what she can do with that. I
know Aunt Eunice, Uncle Henry's wife, hasn't a good dress, either. I
think I shall buy a brown satin for her."

"How awful good you are, sister!" said little Evelyn, and Maria quite
agreed with her. The conviction of her own goodness, and her
forthcoming power to exercise it, filled her soul with a gentle,
stimulating warmth after she was in bed. The moonlight shone brightly
into her room. She gazed at the bright shaft of silver it made across
all her familiar possessions, and, notwithstanding her young girl
dreams were gone, she realized that, although she had lost all the
usual celestial dreams and rafters of romance which go to make a
young girl's air-castle, she had still left some material, even if of
less importance.

She spent, on the whole, a very happy summer. Her father looked
entirely well; she was busy in preparations for her life in Amity;
and, what relieved her the most, Wollaston Lee was not at home for
more than five days during the entire vacation. He went camping-out
with a party of college-boys. Maria was, therefore, not subjected to
the nervous strain of seeing him. During the few days he was at home
he had his chum with him, and Maria only saw him twice--once on the
street, when she returned his bow distantly and heard with no
pleasure the other boy ask who that pretty girl was, and once in
church. She gave only the merest side-glance at him in church, and
she was not sure that he looked at her at all, but she went home pale
and nervous. A secret of any kind is a hard thing for a girl to bear
about with her, and Maria's, which was both tragic and absurd, was
severer than most. At times it seemed to her, when she looked in her
glass, that all she saw was the secret; it seemed to her, when other
people looked at her, that it was all they saw. It was one reason for
her readiness to go to Amity. She would there be out of reach of
people who could in any way have penetrated her secret. She would not
run the risk of meeting Wollaston; of meeting his father and mother,
and wondering if he had, after all, told; of meeting Gladys Mann, and
wondering if she had told, and knowing that she knew.

Maria, in these last months, saw very little of