“No,” replied Maria, and her tone was a little curt even to her father.  “And I used up the last bit of chocolate in the house, too.”  Then she scudded out of the room with her tray and passed the front door as the sound of Ida’s latch-key was heard in the lock.  Maria set her tray on the kitchen-table and hurried up the back stairs to her own room.  She entered it and locked both doors, the one communicating with the hall and the one which connected it with Evelyn’s room.  She had no sooner done so than she heard the quick patter of little feet, and the door leading into Evelyn’s room was tried, then violently shaken.  “Let me in, sister; let me in,” cried the sweet little flute of a voice on the other side.  Evelyn could now talk plainly, but she still kept to her baby appellation for her sister.

“No, darling, sister can’t let you in now,” replied Maria.

“Why not?  Let me in, sister.”

“Sister is going to study,” said Maria, in a firm voice.  “She can’t have Evelyn.  Run down-stairs, darling; run down to mamma.”

“Evelyn don’t want mamma.  Evelyn wants sister.”

“Papa is down there, too.  Put on your clothes, like a nice girl, and show papa how smart you can be; then run down.”

“Evelyn can’t button up her dress.”

“Put everything on but that, then run down, and mamma can do it for you.”

“Let me in, sister.”

“No, dear,” Maria said again.  “Evelyn can’t come in now.”

There came a little whimper of grief and anger which cut Maria’s heart, but she was firm.  She could not have even Evelyn then.  She had to be alone with the knowledge she had just gained of her father’s state of health.  She sat down in her little chair by the window; it was her own baby chair, which she had kept all these years, and in which she could still sit comfortably, she was so slender.  Then she put her face in her hands and began to weep.  She had never wept as she did then, not even when her mother died.  She was so much younger when her mother died that her sensibilities had not acquired their full acumen; then, too, she had not had at that time the awful foretaste of a desolate future which tinctured with bitter her very soul.  Somehow, although Maria had noticed for a long time that her father did not look as he had done, it had never occurred to her that that which had happened to her mother could happen to her father.  She had been like one in a house which has been struck by lightning, and had been rendered thereby incredulous of a second stroke.  It had not occurred to her that whereas she had lost her mother, she could also lose her father.  It seemed like too heavy a hammer-stroke of Providence to believe in and keep her reason.  She had thought that her father was losing his youth, that his hair turning gray had much to do with his altered looks.  She had never thought of death.  It seemed to her monstrous.  A rage against Providence, like nothing which she had known before, was over