“Yes, sir,” she replied, with a sob.

“Well, then, do just as your aunt says, and be a good little girl,” said Harry, and he went hastily out on the porch with his cigar.

Nothing irritated him so much as to see Maria weep for her mother.  He was one of those who wrestle and fight against grief, and to see it thrust in his face by the impetus of another heart exasperated him, although he could say nothing.  It may be that, with his temperament, it was even dangerous for him to cherish grief, and, for that very reason, he tried to put his dead wife out of his mind, as she had been taken out of his life.

“Well, men are different from women,” Aunt Maria said to her niece Maria one night, when Harry had gone out on the piazza, after he had talked and laughed a good deal at the supper-table.

Harry Edgham heard the remark, and his face took on a set expression which it could assume at times.  He did not like his sister-in-law, although he disguised the fact.  She was very useful.  His meals were always on time, the house was as neatly kept as before, and Maria was being trained as she had never been in household duties.

Maria was obedient, under silent protest, to her aunt.  Often, after she had been bidden to perform some household task, and obeyed, she had gone to her own room and wept, and told herself that her mother would never have put such things on her.  She had no one in whom to confide.  She was not a girl to have unlimited intimates among other girls at school.  She was too self-centred, and, if the truth were told, too emulative.

“Maria Edgham thinks she’s awful smart,” one girl would say to another.  They all admitted, even the most carping, that Maria was pretty.  “Maria Edgham is pretty enough, and she knows it,” said they.  She was in the high school, even at her age, and she stood high in her classes.  There was always a sort of moral strike going on against Maria, as there is against all superiority, especially when the superiority is known to be recognized by the possessor thereof.

In spite of her prettiness, she was not a favorite even among the boys.  They were, as a rule, innocent as well as young, but they would rather have snatched a kiss from such a pretty, dainty little creature than have had her go above them in the algebra class.  It did not seem fitting.  Without knowing it, they were envious.  They would not even acknowledge her cleverness, not even Wollaston Lee, for whom Maria entertained a rudimentary affection.  He was even rude to her.

“Maria Edgham is awful stuck up,” he told his mother.  He was of that age when a boy tells his mother a good deal, and he was an only child.

“She’s a real pretty little girl, and her aunt says she is a good girl,” replied his mother, who regarded the whole as the antics of infancy.

The Lees lived near the Edghams, on the same street, and Mrs. Lee and Aunt Maria had exchanged several calls.  They were, in fact, almost intimate.  The Lees were at the supper-table when Wollaston made his deprecatory remark concerning Maria, and he had been led to do so by the law of sequence.  Mrs. Lee had made a remark about Aunt Maria to her husband.  “I believe she thinks Harry Edgham will marry her,” she said.