Maria thanked her, but she detected an odd ring of insincerity in Ida’s voice.  After she went to bed that night she speculated as to what it meant.  Evelyn was not with her.  Ida had insisted that she should occupy her own room.

“You will keep each other awake,” she said.

Evelyn had grown noticeably thin and pale in a few days.  The child had adored her father.  Often, at the table, she would look at his vacant place, and push away her plate, and sob.  Ida had become mildly severe with her on account of it.

“My dear child,” she said, “of course we all feel just as you do, but we control ourselves.  It is the duty of those who live to control themselves.”

“I want my papa!” sobbed Evelyn convulsively.

“You had better go away from the table, dear,” said Ida calmly.  “I will have a plate of dinner kept warm for you, and by-and-by when you feel like it, you can go down to the kitchen and Agnes will give it to you.”

In fact, poor little Evelyn, who was only a child and needed her food, did steal down to the kitchen about nine o’clock and got her plate of dinner.  But she was more satisfied by Agnes bursting into tears and talking about her “blissed father that was gone, and how there was niver a man like him,” and actually holding her in her great lap while she ate.  It was a meal seasoned with tears, but also sweetened with honest sympathy.  Evelyn, when she slipped up the back stairs to her own room after her supper, longed to go into her sister’s room and sleep with her, but she did not dare.  Her little bed was close to the wall, against which, on the other side, Maria’s bed stood, and once Evelyn distinctly heard a sob.  She sobbed too, but softly, lest her mother hear.  Evelyn felt that she and Maria and Agnes were the only ones who really mourned for her father, although she viewed her mother in her mourning robes with a sort of awe, and a feeling that she must believe in a grief on her part far beyond hers and Maria’s.  Ida had obtained a very handsome mourning wardrobe for both herself and Evelyn, and had superintended Maria’s.  Maria paid for her clothes out of her small earnings, however.  Ida had her dress-maker’s bill made out separately, and gave it to her.  Maria calculated that she would have just about enough to pay her fare back to Amity without touching that sacred blood-money in the savings-bank.  It had been on that occasion that Ida had made the remark to her about her always considering that house as her home, and had done so with that odd expression which caused Maria to speculate.  Maria decided that night, as she lay awake in bed, that Ida had something on her mind which she was keeping a secret for the present.  The surmise was quite justified, but Maria had not the least suspicion of what it was until three days before her vacation was to end, when Ida received a letter with the Amity post-mark, directed in Aunt Maria’s precise, cramped handwriting.  She spoke about it to Maria, who had brought it herself from the office that evening after Evelyn had gone to bed.