“Nonsense!” said Maria.  “Just because a young man walks home with me once you think he is in love with me.”  Maria tried to speak lightly and scornfully, but in spite of herself there was an accent of gratification in her tone.  In spite of herself she forgot for the moment.

“I think he does, all the same,” said Lily, dejectedly.

“Nonsense!  He doesn’t; and if he did, he would have to take it out in caring.”

“Then you were in earnest about what you said last night?” said Lily, eagerly.  “You really mean you wouldn’t have George Ramsey if he asked you?”

“Not if he asked every day in the year for a hundred years.”

“I guess you must have seen somebody else whom you liked,” said Lily, and Maria colored furiously.  Then Lily laughed.  “Oh, you have!” she cried, with sudden glee.  “You are blushing like anything.  Do tell me, Maria.”

“I have nothing to tell.”

“Maria Edgham, you don’t dare tell me you are not in love with anybody?”

“I should not answer a question of that kind to any other girl, anyway,” Maria replied, angrily.

“You are.  I know it,” said Lily.  “Don’t be angry, dear.  I am real glad.”

“I didn’t say I was in love, and there is nothing for you to be glad about,” returned Maria, fairly scarlet with shame and rage.  She tangled the silk with which she was working, and broke it short off.  Maria was as yet not wholly controlled by herself.

“Why, you’ll spoil that daisy,” Lily said, wonderingly.  She herself was incapable of any such retaliation upon inanimate objects.  She would have carefully untangled her silk, no matter how deeply she suffered.

“I don’t care if I do!” cried Maria.

“Why, Maria!”

“Well, I don’t care.  I am fairly sick of so much talk and thinking about love and getting married, as if there were nothing else.”

“Maybe you are different, Maria,” admitted Lily, in a humiliated fashion.

“I don’t want to hear any more about it,” Maria said, taking a fresh thread from her skein of white silk.

“But do you mean what you said?”

“Yes, I do, once for all.  That settles it.”

Lily looked at her wistfully.  She did not find Maria as sympathetic as she wished.  Then she glanced at her beautiful visage in the glass, and remembered what the other girl had said about her beauty, and again she smiled her childlike smile of gratified vanity and pleasure.  Then suddenly the door-bell rang.

Lily gave a great start, and turned white as she looked at Maria.  “It’s George Ramsey,” she whispered.

“Nonsense!  How do you know?” asked Maria, laying her work on the table beside the lamp, and rising.

“I don’t know.  I do know.”

“Nonsense!” Still Maria stood looking irresolutely at Lily.

“I know,” said Lily, and she trembled perceptibly.

“I don’t see how you can tell,” said Maria.  She made a step towards the door.