offer to accompany her home, and how she must not allow it, and how she wanted him to do so.  She kept her head steadfastly averted.  The meeting dragged on.  Men rose and spoke and prayed, at intervals the out-of-tune piano was invoked.  A woman behind Maria sang contralto with a curious effect, as if her head were in a tin-pail.  There were odd, dull, metallic echoes about it which filled the whole chapel.  The woman’s daughter had some cheap perfume on her handkerchief, and she was incessantly removing it from her muff.  A man at the left coughed a good deal.  Maria saw in front of her Lily Merrill’s graceful brown head, in a charming hat with red roses under the brim, and a long, soft, brown feather.  Lily’s mother was not with her.  Dr. Ellridge did not attend evening meetings, and Mrs. Merrill always remained at home in the hope that he might call.

After church was over, Maria stuck closely to her aunts.  She even pushed herself between them, but they did not abet her.  Both Eunice and Aunt Maria had seen George Ramsey, and they had their own views.  Maria could not tell how it happened, but at the door of the chapel she found herself separated from both her aunts, and George Ramsey was asking if he might accompany her home.  Maria obeyed her instincts, although the next moment she could have killed herself for it.  She smiled, and bowed, and tucked her little hand into the crook of the young man’s offered arm.  She did not see her aunts exchanging glances of satisfaction.

“It will be a real good chance for her,” said Eunice.

“Hush, or somebody will hear you,” said Maria, in a sharp, pleased tone, as she and her sister-in-law walked together down the moonlit street.

Maria did not see Lily Merrill’s start and look of piteous despair as she took George’s arm.  Lily was just behind her.  Maria, in fact, saw nothing.  She might have been walking in a vacuum of emotion.

“It is a beautiful evening,” said George Ramsey, and his voice trembled a little.

“Yes, beautiful,” replied Maria.

Afterwards, thinking over their conversation, she could not remember that they had talked about anything else except the beauty of the evening, but had dwelt incessantly upon it, like the theme of a song.

The aunts lagged behind purposely, and Maria went in Eunice’s door.  She thought that her niece would ask George to come in and she would not be in the way.  Henry looked inquiringly at the two women, who had an air of mystery, and Maria responded at once to his unspoken question.

“George Ramsey is seeing her home,” she said, “and the front-door key is under the mat, and I thought Maria could ask him in, and I would go home through the cellar, and not be in the way.  Three is a company.”  Maria said the last platitude with a silly simper.

“I never saw anything like you women,” said Henry, with a look of incredulous amusement.  “I suppose you both of you have been making her wedding-dress, and setting her up house-keeping, instead of listening to the meeting.”