“Come away, darling,” she said.  “Papa is tired, and you are a heavy little lump of honey,” Ida smiled, entrancingly.

Harry looked at her with loving admiration, then at Maria.

“I tell you what it is, I feel pretty thankful to-night, when I think of last night—­when I realize I have you all home,” said he.

Ida smiled more radiantly.  “Yes, we ought to be very thankful,” she said.

Maria made up her mind that she would apologize to her if she had a chance.  She did not wish to speak before her father, not because she did not wish him to know, but because she did not wish to annoy him, he looked so tired.  She had a chance after dinner, when Josephine was putting Evelyn to bed, and Harry had been called to the door to speak to a man on business.

“I am sorry I spoke as I did to you,” she said, in a low voice, to Ida.

They were both in the parlor.  Maria had a school-book in her hand, and Ida was embroidering.  The rosy shade of the lamp intensified the glow on her beautiful face.  She looked smilingly at Maria.

“Why, my dear,” she said, “I don’t know what you said.  I have forgotten.”

Chapter XVI

Now commenced an odd period of her existence for Maria Edgham.  She escaped a transition stage which comes to nearly every girl by her experience in New York, the night when Evelyn was lost.  There is usually for a girl, if not for a boy, a stage of existence when she flutters, as it were, over the rose of life, neither lighting upon it nor leaving it, when she is not yet herself, when she does not comprehend herself at all, except by glimpses of emotions, as one may see one facet of a diamond but never the complete stone.  Maria had, in a few hours, become settled, crystallized, and she gave evidence of it indisputably in one way—­she had lost her dreams.  When a girl no longer dreams of her future she has found herself.  Maria had always been accustomed to go to sleep lulled by her dreams of innocent romance.  Now she no longer had them, it was as if a child missed a lullaby.  She was a long time in getting to sleep at all, and she did not sleep well.  She no longer stared over the page of a lesson-book into her own future, as into a crystal well wherein she saw herself glorified by new and strange happiness.  She studied, and took higher places in her classes, but she did not look as young or as well.  She grew taller and thinner, and she looked older.  People said Maria Edgham was losing her beauty, that she would not be as pretty a woman as she had promised to make, after all.  Maria no longer dwelt so long and pleasurably upon her reflection in the glass.  She simply arranged her hair and neck-gear tidily and went her way.  She did not care so much for her pretty clothes.  A girl without her dreams is a girl without her glory of youth.  She did not quite realize what was the matter, but she knew that she was no longer so