Maria gazed at her father with suspicion, which he did not recognize.

It had never occurred to Harry Edgham to marry Aunt Maria.  It had never occurred to him that she might think of the possibility of such a thing.  It was now nearly a year since his wife’s death.  He himself began to take more pains with his attire.  Maria noticed it.  She saw her father go out one evening clad in a new, light-gray suit, which he had never worn before.  She looked at him wonderingly when he kissed her good-bye.  Harry never left the house without kissing his little daughter.

“Why, you’ve got a new suit, father,” she said.

Harry blushed.  “Do you like it, dear?” he asked.

“No, father, I don’t like it half as well as a dark one,” replied Maria, in a sweet, curt little voice.  Her father colored still more, and laughed, then he went away.

Aunt Maria, to Maria’s mind, was very much dressed-up that evening.  She had on a muslin dress with sprigs of purple running through it, and a purple ribbon around her waist.  She made up her mind that she would stay up until her father came home, in that new gray suit, no matter what Aunt Maria should say.

However, contrary to her usual custom, Aunt Maria did not mention, at half-past eight, that it was time for her to go to bed.  It was half-past nine, and her father had not come home, and Aunt Maria had said nothing about it.  She appeared to be working very interestedly on a sofa-cushion which she was embroidering, but her face looked, to Maria’s mind, rather woe-begone, although there was a shade of wrath in the woe.  When the little clock on the sitting-room shelf struck one for half-past nine, Maria looked at her aunt, wondering.

“Why, I wonder where father has gone so late?” she said.

Aunt Maria turned, and her voice, in reply, was both pained and pitiless.  “Well, you may as well know first as last,” said she, “and you’d better hear it from me than outside:  your father has gone courtin’.”

Chapter V

Maria looked at her aunt with an expression of almost idiocy.  For the minute, the term Aunt Maria used, especially as applied to her father, had no more meaning for her than a term in a foreign tongue.  She was very pale.  “Courtin’,” she stammered out vaguely, imitating her aunt exactly, even to the dropping of the final “g.”

Aunt Maria was, for the moment, too occupied with her own personal grievances and disappointments to pay much attention to her little niece.  “Yes, courtin’,” she said, harshly.  “I’ve been suspectin’ for some time, an’ now I know.  A man, when he’s left a widower, don’t smarten up the way he’s done for nothin’; I know it.”  Aunt Maria nodded her head aggressively, with a gesture almost of butting.

Maria continued to gaze at her, with that pale, almost idiotic expression.  It was a fact that she had thought of her father as being as much married as ever, even although her mother was dead.  Nothing else had occurred to her.