“Yes,” said Ida.  To do her justice, she regarded the little rosy-and-white thing sunk in slumber with a certain tenderness.  She was even thankful.  She had been exceedingly disturbed the whole day.  She was very glad to have this happy termination, and to be able to go to rest in peace.  She bent again over the child, and touched her lips lightly to the little face, and when she looked up her own was softened.  “Yes,” she whispered, with more of womanly feeling than Harry had ever seen in her—­“yes, you are right, we have a great deal to be thankful for.”

Maria, in the next room, heard quite distinctly what Ida said.  It would once have aroused in her a contemptuous sense of her step-mother’s hypocrisy, but now she felt too humbled herself to blame another, even to realize any fault in another.  She felt as if she had undergone a tremendous cataclysm of spirit, which had cast her forever from her judgment-seat as far as others were concerned.  Was she not deceiving as never Ida had deceived?  What would Ida say?  What would her father say if he knew that she was—?  She could not say the word even to herself.  When she was in bed and her light out, she was overcome by a nervous stress which almost maddened her.  Faces seemed to glower at her out of the blackness of the night, faces which she knew were somehow projected out of her own consciousness, but which were none the less terrific.  She even heard her name shouted, and strange, isolated words, and fragments of sentences.  She lay in a deadly fear.  Now was the time when, if her own mother had been alive, she would have screamed aloud for some aid.  But now she could call to no one.  She would have spoken to her father.  She would not have told him—­she was gripped too fast by her sense of the need of secrecy—­but she would have obtained the comfort and aid of his presence and soothing words; but there was Ida.  She remembered how she had talked to Ida, and her father was with her.  A dull wonder even seized her as to whether Ida would tell her father, and she should be allowed to remain at home after saying such dreadful things.  There was no one upon whom she could call.  All at once she thought of the maid Annie, whose room was directly over hers.  Annie was kindly.  She would slip up-stairs to her, and make some excuse for doing so—­ask her if she did not smell smoke, or something.  It seemed to her that if she did not hear another human voice, come in contact with something human, she should lose all control of herself.

Maria, little, slender, trembling girl, with all the hysterical fancies of her sex crowding upon her, all the sufferings of her sex waiting for her in the future, and with no mother to soften them, slipped out of bed, stole across her room, and opened the door with infinite caution.  Then she went up the stairs which led to the third story.  Both maids had rooms on the third story.  Josephine went home at night, and Hannah, the cook, had gone home with