“Take the trunk up the stairs, to the room at the left,” said Harry Edgham, “and go as still as you can.”  The man obeyed, shouldering the little trunk with an awed look.

Aunt Maria drew Mrs. White and Maria’s father aside, and Maria was conscious that they did not want her to hear; but she did overhear—­“...one chance in ten, a fighting chance,” and “Keep it from Maria, her mother had said so.”  Maria knew perfectly well that that horrible and mysterious thing, an operation, which means a duel with death himself, was even at that moment going on in her mother’s room.  She slipped away, and went up-stairs to her own chamber, and softly closed the door.  Then she forgot her lack of faith and her rebellion, and she realized that her only hope of life was from that which is outside life.  She knelt down beside her bed, and began to pray over and over, “O God, don’t let my mother die, and I will always be a good girl!  O God, don’t let my mother die, and I will always be a good girl!”

Then, without any warning, the door opened and her father stood there, and behind him was her aunt Maria, weeping bitterly, and Mrs. White, also weeping.

“Maria,” gasped out Harry Edgham.  Then, as Maria rose and went to him, he seized upon her as if she were his one straw of salvation, and began to sob himself, and Maria knew that her mother had died.

Chapter IV

Without any doubt, Maria’s self-consciousness, which was at its height at this time, helped her to endure the loss of her mother, and all the sad appurtenances of mourning.  She had a covert pleasure at the sight of her fair little face, in her black hat, above her black frock.  She realized a certain importance because of her grief.

However, there were times when the grief itself came uppermost; there were nights when she lay awake crying for her mother, when she was nothing but a bereft child in a vacuum of love.  Her father’s tenderness could not make up to her for the loss of her mother’s.  Very soon after her mother’s death, his mercurial temperament jarred upon her.  She could not understand how he could laugh and talk as if nothing had happened.  She herself was more like her mother in temperament—­that is, like the New-Englander who goes through life with the grief of a loss grown to his heart.  Nothing could exceed Harry Edgham’s tenderness to his motherless little girl.  He was always contriving something for her pleasure and comfort; but Maria, when her father laughed, regarded him with covert wonder and reproach.

Her aunt Maria continued to live with them, and kept the house.  Aunt Maria was very capable.  It is doubtful if there are many people on earth who are not crowned, either to their own consciousness or that of others, with at least some small semblance of glories.  Aunt Maria had the notable distinction of living on one hundred dollars a year.  She had her rent free, but upon that she did not enlarge.