Maria trembled so that she could hardly stand.  She looked hastily around; there was no one in sight.  She sank down on a large stone which had fallen from the stone wall on the left.  Then she opened the little, sealed letter.  It was very short.  It contained only one word, one word of the vulgar slang to which poor Gladys had become habituated through her miserable life, and yet this one word of slang had a meaning of faithfulness and honor which dignified it.  Maria read, “Nit.” and she knew that Gladys had died and had not told.

Chapter XXIX

It is frequently a chain of sequences whose beginnings are lost in obscurity which lead to events.  The principal of the Normal School in Westbridge, which Evelyn attended and in which Maria taught, had been a certain Professor Lane.  If he had not gone to Boston one morning when the weather was unusually sultry for the season, and if an east wind had not come up, causing him, being thinly clad, to take cold, which cold meant the beginning of a rapid consumption which hurried him off to Colorado, and a year later to death; if these east winds had not made it impossible for Wollaston Lee’s mother, now widowed, to live with him in the college town where he had been stationed, a great deal which happened might not have come to pass at all.  It was “the wind which bloweth where it listeth, and no man knoweth whence it cometh and whither it goeth,” which precipitated the small tragedy of a human life.

The Saturday before the fall term commenced, Evelyn came home from Westbridge, where she had been for some shopping, and she had a piece of news.  She did not wait to remove her hat, but stood before Maria and her aunt, who were sewing in the sitting-room, with the roses nestling against the soft flying tendrils of her black hair.  It was still so warm that she wore her summer hat.

“What do you think!” said she.  “I have such a piece of news!”

“What is it, dear?” asked Maria.  Aunt Maria looked up curiously.

“Why, Professor Lane has had to give up.  He starts for Colorado Monday.  He kept hoping he could stay here, but he went to a specialist, who told him he could not live six months in this climate, so he is starting right off.  And we are to have a new principal.”

“Who is he?” asked Maria.  She felt herself trembling, for no reason that she could define.

“Addie Hemingway says he is a handsome young man.  He has been a professor in some college, but his mother lives with him, and the climate didn’t agree with her, and so he had resigned and was out of a position, and they have sent right away for him, and he is coming.  In fact, Addie says she thinks he has come, and that he and his mother are at Mrs. Land’s boarding-house; but they are going to keep house.  Addie says she has heard he is a young man and very handsome.”

“What is his name?” asked Maria, faintly.