“The poor little thing can go to school now,” said Maria.  There was gratitude in her voice, and yet, oddly enough, still a tinge of reproach.

“If mother and I had dreamed of the true state of affairs we would have done something before,” George Ramsey said, with an accent of apology; and yet he could not see for the life of him why he should be apologetic for the poverty of these degenerate relatives of his.  He could not see why he was called upon to be his brother’s keeper in this case, but there was something about Maria’s serious, accusing gaze of blue eyes, and her earnest voice, that made him realize that he could prostrate himself before her for uncommitted sins.  Somehow, Maria made him feel responsible for all that he might have done wrong as well as his actual wrong-doing, although he laughed at himself for his mental attitude.  Suddenly a thought struck him.  “When are you going to take all these things (how you ever managed to get so much for ten dollars I don’t understand) to the child?” he asked, eagerly.

Maria replied, unguardedly, that she intended to take them after supper that night.  “Then she will have them all ready for Monday,” she said.

“Then let me go with you and carry the parcels,” George Ramsey said, eagerly.

Maria stiffened.  “Thank you,” she said, “but Uncle Henry is going with me, and there is no need.”

Maria felt her aunt Eunice give a sudden start and make an inarticulate murmur of remonstrance, then she checked herself.  Maria knew that her uncle walked a mile from his factory to save car-fare; she knew also that she was telling what was practically an untruth, since she had made no agreement with her uncle to accompany her.

“I should be happy to go with you,” said George Ramsey, in a boyish, abashed voice.

Maria said nothing more.  She looked past her aunt out of the window.  The full moon was rising, and all at once all the girl’s sweet light of youthful romance appeared again above her mental horizon.  She felt that it would be almost heaven to walk with George Ramsey in that delicious moonlight, in the clear, frosty air, and take little Jessy Ramsey her gifts.  Maria was of an almost abnormal emotional nature, although there was little that was material about the emotion.  She dreamed of that walk as she might have dreamed of a walk with a fairy prince through fairy-land, and her dream was as innocent, but it unnerved her.  She said again, in a tremulous voice, that she was very much obliged, and murmured something again about her uncle Henry; and George Ramsey replied, with a certain sober dignity, that he should have been very happy.

Soon after that the car stopped to let off some passengers, and George moved to a vacant seat in front.  He did not turn around again.  Maria looked at his square shoulders and again gazed past her aunt at the full orb of the moon rising with crystalline splendor in the pale amber of the east.  There was a clear gold sunset which sent its reflection over the whole sky.