“Promise.”

“Well, I won’t tell her.”

Evelyn looked up in her sister’s face with her wonderful dark eyes, a rose flush spread over her face.  “Well, I am in love,” she whispered.

Maria laughed, although she tried not to.  “Well, with whom, dear?” she asked.

“With a boy.  Do you think it is wrong, sister?”

“No, I don’t think it is very wrong,” replied Maria, trying to restrain her smile.

“His first name is pretty, but his last isn’t so very,” Evelyn said, regretfully.  “His first name is Ernest.  Don’t you think that is a pretty name?”

“Very pretty.”

“But his last name is only Jenks,” said Evelyn, with a mortified air.  “That is horrid, isn’t it?”

“Nobody can help his name,” said Maria, consolingly.

“Of course he can’t.  Poor Ernest isn’t to blame because his mother married a man named Jenks; but I wish she hadn’t.  If we ever get married, I don’t want to be called Mrs. Jenks.  Don’t people ever change their names, sister?”

“Sometimes, I believe.”

“Well, I shall not marry him unless he changes his name.  But he is such a pretty boy.  He looks across the school-room at me, and once, when I met him in the vestibule, and there was nobody else there, he asked me to kiss him, and I did.”

“I don’t think you ought to kiss boys,” said Maria.

“I would rather kiss him than another girl,” said Evelyn, looking up at her sister with the most limpid passion, that of a child who has not the faintest conception of what passion means.

“Well, sister would rather you did not,” said Maria.

“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” said Evelyn, meekly.  “That was quite a long time ago.  It is not very likely I shall meet him anywhere where we could kiss each other, anyway.  Of course, I don’t really love him as much as I do you and papa.  I would rather he died than you or papa; but I am in love with him—­you know what I mean, sister?”

“I wouldn’t think any more about it, dear,” said Maria.

“I like to think about him,” said Evelyn, simply.  “I like to sit whole hours and think about him, and make sort of stories about us, you know—­how me meet somewhere, and he tells me how much he loves me, and how we kiss each other again.  It makes me happy.  I go to sleep so.  Do you think it is wrong, sister?”

Maria remembered her own childhood.  “Perhaps it isn’t wrong, exactly, dear,” she said, “but I wouldn’t, if I were you.  I think it is better not.”

“Well, I will try not to,” said Evelyn, with a sigh.  “He told Amy Jones I was the prettiest girl in school.  Of course we couldn’t be married for a long time, and I wouldn’t be Mrs. Jenks.  But, now you’ve come home, maybe I sha’n’t want to think so much about him.”

Maria found new maids when she reached home.  Ida did not keep her domestics very long.  However, nobody could say that was her fault in this age when man-servants and maid-servants buzz angrily, like bees, over household tasks and are constantly hungering for new fields.