“It is not Evelyn, but Maria,” he said to himself, and shut his mouth hard.  He resumed his attitude of obedience to duty, but one who is driven by duty alone almost involuntarily balks in spirit.

Wollaston was conscious of balking, although he would not retreat.  When he saw Maria again after the exercises of the day were closed, and he encountered her as she was leaving the academy, she looked distinctly homely to him, and yet such was the honor of the man that he did not in the least realize that the homeliness was an exterior thing.  It seemed to him that he saw her encompassed with the stiffness of her New England antecedents, as with an armor, and that he got a new and unlovely view of her character.  On the contrary, Evelyn’s charming, half-smiling, half-piteous face turned towards him seemed to afford glimpses of sweetest affections and womanly gentleness and devotion.  Evelyn wished to say that she was sorry that they were obliged to refuse his invitation, but she did not dare.  Instead, she gave him that little, half-smiling, half-piteous glance, to which he responded with a lighting up of his whole face and lift of his hat.  Then Evelyn smiled entirely, and her backward glance at him was wonderfully alluring, yet maidenly, almost childish.  Wollaston, on his way home, thought again how different it would be if Evelyn, instead of Maria, were his wife.  Then he put it out of his head resolutely.

The next morning Maria arranged her hair as usual.  She had comprehended that something more than mere externals were needful to change the mind of a man like Wollaston, and she gave up the attempt, it must be acknowledged, with a little pleasure.  Feminine vanity was inherent in Maria.  Nobody knew what the making herself hideous the day before had cost her.

“Oh, I am so glad you have done up your hair the old way,” Evelyn cried, when she saw her, and Aunt Maria remarked that she was glad to see that she had not quite lost her common-sense.

Maria began herself to think that she had not evinced much sense in her procedure of the day before.  She had underestimated the character of the man whom she had married, and had made herself ridiculous for nothing.  The boy who was infatuated with her, when he saw her on the trolley that morning, made a movement to go forward and speak to her, then he sat still with frequent puzzled glances at her.  He was repelled if Wollaston was not.  This changing of the face of a woman in a day’s time filled him with suspicion.  He looked hard at Maria’s soft puff of hair, and reflected that it might be a wig; that anyway he was not so much in love as he had thought, with a girl who could look as Maria had done the day before.

When Maria reached the academy, the teachers greeted her with enthusiasm.  One who was given to exuberance fairly embraced her.

“Now you are my own beautiful Miss Edgham again,” said she.

Wollaston, during the opening exercises, only glanced once at her, then he saw no difference.  But he did look at Evelyn, and when she turned her lovely face away before his gaze and a soft blush rose over her round cheeks he felt his pulses quicken.  But he did not speak a word to Maria or Evelyn all day.