The spring was very early that year.  The apple-trees were in blossom at an unusual time.  There was a tiny orchard back of the Edgham house.  Maria used to steal away down there, sit down on the grass, speckled with pink-and-white petals, and look up through the rosy radiance of bloom at the infinite blue light of the sky.  It seemed to her for the first time she laid hold on life in the midst of death.  She wondered if she could always feel as she did then.  She had a premonition that this state, which bordered on ecstasy, would not endure.

“Maria does not act natural, poor child,” Ida said to Mrs. Voorhees.  “She hardly sheds a tear.  Sometimes I fear that her father’s marrying again did wean her a little from him.”

“She may have deep feelings,” suggested Mrs. Voorhees.  Mrs. Voorhees was an exuberant blonde, with broad shallows of sentimentality overflowing her mind.

“Perhaps she has,” Ida assented, with a peculiar smile curling her lips.  Ida looked handsomer than ever in her mourning attire.  The black softened her beauty, instead of bringing it into bolder relief, as is sometimes the case.  Ida mourned Harry in a curious fashion.  She mourned the more pitifully because of the absence of any mourning at all, in its truest sense.  Ida had borne in upon her the propriety of deep grief, and she, maintaining that attitude, cramped her very soul because of its unnaturalness.  She consoled herself greatly because of what she esteemed her devotion to the man who was gone.  She said to herself, with a preen of her funereal crest, that she had been such a wife to poor Harry as few men ever had possessed.

“Well, I have the consolation of thinking that I have done my duty,” she said to Mrs. Voorhees.

“Of course you have, dear, and that is worth everything,” responded her friend.

“I did all I could to make his home attractive,” said Ida, “and he never had to wait for a meal.  How pretty he thought those new hangings in the parlor were!  Poor Harry had an aesthetic sense, and I did my best to gratify it.  It is a consolation.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Voorhees.

If Ida had known how Maria regarded those very red silk parlor hangings she would have been incredulous.  Maria thought to herself how hard her poor father had worked, and how the other hangings, which had been new at the time of Ida’s marriage, could not have been worn out.  She wanted to tear down the filmy red things and stuff them into the kitchen stove.  When she found out that her father had saved up nearly a thousand dollars for her, which was deposited to her credit in the Edgham savings-bank, her heart nearly broke because of that.  She imagined her father going without things to save that little pittance for her, and she hated the money.  She said to herself that she would never touch it.  And yet she loved her father for saving it for her with a very anguish of love.

Ida was manifestly surprised when Henry’s will was read and she learned of Maria’s poor little legacy, but she touched her cool red lips to Maria’s cheek and told her how glad she was.  “It will be a little nest-egg for you,” she said, “and it will buy your trousseau.  And, of course, you will always feel at perfect liberty to come here whenever you wish to do so.  Your room will be kept just as it is.”