Maria Stillman was right.  Evelyn remained in Amity.  She outgrew Maria’s school, and attended the Normal School in Westbridge.  Maria herself outgrew her little Amity school, and obtained a position as teacher in one of the departments of the Normal School, and still Ida had not returned.  She wrote often, and in nearly every letter spoke of the probability of her speedy return, and in the same breath of her precarious health.  She could not, however, avoid telling of her social triumphs in London.  Ida was evidently having an aftermath of youth in her splendid maturity.  She was evidently flattered and petted, and was thoroughly enjoying herself.  Aunt Maria said she guessed she would marry again.

“She’s too old,” said Maria.

“Wait till you’re old yourself and you won’t be so ready to judge,” said her aunt.  “I ain’t so sure she won’t.”

Evelyn was a young lady, and was to graduate the next year, and still her mother had not returned.  She was the sweetest young creature in the world at that time.  She was such a beauty that people used to turn and stare after her.  Evelyn never seemed to notice it, but she was quite conscious, in a happy, childlike fashion, of her beauty.  She resembled her mother to a certain extent, but she had nothing of Ida’s hardness.  Where her mother froze, she flamed.  Two-thirds of the boys in the Normal School were madly in love with her, but Evelyn, in spite of her temperament, was slow in development as to her emotions.  She was very childish, although she was full of enthusiasms and nervous energy.  Maria had long learned that when Evelyn told her she was in love, as she frequently did, it did not in the least mean that she was, in the ordinary acceptation of the term.  Evelyn was very imaginative.  She loved her dreams, and she often raised, as it were, a radiance of rainbows about some boy of her acquaintance, but the brightness vanished the instant the boy made advances.  She had an almost fierce virginity of spirit in spite of her loving heart.  She did not wish to touch her butterflies of life.  She used to walk between her aunt and Maria when they were coming out of church, so that no boy would ask leave to go home with her.  She clung to the girls in her class for protection when she went to any entertainment.  Consequently her beautiful face, about which clustered her dark, fine hair like mist, aroused no envy.  The other girls said that Evelyn Edgham was such a beauty and she did not know it.  But Evelyn did know it perfectly, only at that time it filled her with a sort of timidity and shame.  It was as if she held some splendid, heavy sword of victory which she had not the courage to wield.  She loved her sister better than anybody else.  She had no very intimate friend of her own sex with whom she fell in love, after the fashion of most young girls.  That might have happened had it not been for her sister, whom Evelyn thought of always as excelling everybody else in beauty and goodness and general brilliancy.