It was quite a walk from the academy.  She dreamed of Wollaston’s escorting her to the trolley-line.  She dressed herself with unusual care when the day came.  She had a long, trailing gown of a pale-blue cloth and a blue knot for her yellow hair.  She also had quite a pretentious blue evening cloak.  Christmas afternoon a long box full of pale-yellow roses arrived.  There was a card enclosed which Maria caught up quickly and concealed without any one seeing her.  Wollaston had sent her the roses.  Her heart beat so hard and fast that it seemed the others must hear it.  She bent over the roses.  “How perfectly lovely!” she said.

Aunt Maria took up the box and lifted the flowers out carefully.  “There isn’t any card,” she said.  “I wonder who sent them?” All at once a surmise seized her that Professor Lane, who was said to be regaining his health in Colorado, had sent an order to the Westbridge florist for these flowers.  Simultaneously the thought came to Evelyn, but Eunice, who was in the room, looked bewildered.  When Maria carried the roses out to put them in water, she turned to her sister-in-law.  “Who on earth do you suppose sent them?” she whispered.

Aunt Maria looked at her, and formed Professor Lane’s name noiselessly with her lips, giving her at the same time a knowing nod.  Eunice looked at Evelyn, who also nodded, although with a somewhat disturbed expression.  She still did not feel quite reconciled to the idea of her sister’s loving Professor Lane.

“I didn’t know,” said Eunice.

“Nobody knows; but we sort of surmise,” said Aunt Maria.

“Why, he’s old enough to be her father,” Eunice said.

“What of that, if he only gets cured of his consumption?” said Aunt Maria.  She herself felt disgusted, but she had a pleasure in concealing her disgust from her sister-in-law.  “Lots of girls would jump at him,” said she.

“I wouldn’t have when I was a girl,” Eunice remarked, in a mildly reminiscent manner.

“You don’t know what you would have done if you hadn’t got my brother,” said Aunt Maria.

“I would never have married anybody,” Eunice replied, with a fervent, faithful look.  As she spoke, she seemed to see Henry Stillman as he had been, when a young man and courting her, and she felt as if a king had passed her field of memory to the exclusion of all others.

“Maybe you wouldn’t have,” said her sister-in-law, “but nowadays girls have to take what they can get.  Men ain’t so anxious to marry.  When a man had to have all his shirts and dickeys made he was helpless, to say nothing of his pants, but nowadays he can get everything ready-made, and it doesn’t make so much difference to him whether he gets married or not.  He can have a good deal more for himself, if he’s an old bachelor.”

“Maybe you are right,” said Eunice, “but I know when I was a girl Maria’s age I wouldn’t have let an old man like Professor Lane, with the consumption, too, tie my shoes.  Do you suppose he really sent her the roses?”