down and kissed her. "Try and keep quiet, and go to sleep, darling,"
he said. Then he went out.

Aunt Maria was waiting for him in the hall. Her face, from grief and
consternation, had changed to sad and dignified resignation.

"Harry," said she.

Harry Edgham stopped.

"Well, sister," he said, with pleasant interrogation, although he
still looked shamefaced.

Aunt Maria held a lamp, a small one, which she was tipping
dangerously.

"Look out for your lamp, Maria," he said.

She straightened the lamp, and the light shone full upon her swollen
face, at once piteous and wrathful. "I only wanted to know when you
wanted me to go?" she said.

"Oh, Lord, Maria, you are going too fast!" replied Harry, and he
fairly ran into his own room.

The next morning when Maria, in her little black frock--it was made
of 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
situa