“He has never said anything?” asked Maria, and her voice sounded strange in her own ears.

“No, never one word that I could make anything of, but he has looked at me, he has, honest, sister.”  Evelyn burst into fresh sobs.

Then Maria roused herself.  She patted the little, soft, dark head.

“Why, Evelyn, precious,” she said, “you are imagining all this.  You can’t care so much about a man whom you have seen so little.  You have let your mind dwell on it, and you imagine it.  You don’t care.  You can’t, really.  You wait, and by-and-by you will find out that you care a good deal more for somebody else.”

But then Evelyn raised herself and looked down at her sister in the dark, and there was a ring in her voice which Maria had never before heard.  “Not care,” she said—­“not care!  I will stand everything but that.  Maria, don’t you dare tell me I don’t care!”

“But you don’t know him at all, dear.”

“I know him better than anybody else in the whole world,” said Evelyn, still in the same strained voice.  “The very minute I saw him I loved him, and then it seemed as if a great bright light made him plain to me.  I do love him, Maria.  Don’t you ever dare say I don’t.  That is the only thing that makes me feel that I am not ashamed to live, the knowing that I do love him.  I should be dreadful if I didn’t love him—­really love him, I mean, with the love that lasts.  Do you suppose that if I only felt about him as some of the other girls do, that I would have told you?  I do love him!”

“What makes you so sure?”

“What makes me so sure?  Why, everything.  I know there is not another man in the whole world for me that can possibly equal him, and then—­I feel as if my whole life were full of him.  I can’t seem to remember much before he came.  When I look back, it is like looking into the dark, and I can’t imagine the world being at all without him.”

“Would you be willing to be very poor, to go without pretty things if you—­married him, to live in a house like the Ramsey’s on the other side of the river, not to have enough to eat and drink and wear?”

“I would have enough to eat and drink and wear.  I would have as much as a queen if I had him,” cried Evelyn.  “What do you think I care about pretty things, or even food and life itself, when it comes to anything like this?  Live in a house like the Ramsey’s!  I would live in a cave.  I would live on the street, and I should never know it was not a palace.  Maria, you do know that I love him, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know that you think you do.”

“No, say I do.”

“Yes, I know you do,” Maria said.

Then Evelyn lay down again, and wept quietly.

“Yes, I love him,” she moaned, “but he does not love me.  You don’t think he does, do you?  I know you don’t.”

Maria said nothing.  She was sure that he did not.

“No, he does not.  I see you know it,” Evelyn sobbed, “and all I cared about going to the Christmas-tree and wearing my new gown was on account of him, and I sent a beautiful book.  I thought I could do that.  All the girls in the senior class gave him something, and I have been saving up every cent, and he never gave me anything, not even a box of candy or flowers.  Do you think he gave any of the other girls anything, Maria?”