Aunt Maria did what she had never done before:  she reached out her arms and gathered the bewildered little girl close, in an embrace of genuine affection and pity.  She, too, felt that here was a common cause, and not only that, but she pitied the child with unselfish pity.  “You poor child, you are as cold as ice.  Come in here with me,” she whispered.

Maria crept into bed beside her aunt, but she would rather have remained where she was.  She was a child of spiritual rather than physical affinities, and the contact of Aunt Maria’s thin body, even though it thrilled with almost maternal affection for her, repelled her.

Aunt Maria began to weep unrestrainedly, with a curious passion and abandonment for a woman of her years.

“Has he come home?” she whispered.  Aunt Maria’s hearing was slightly defective, especially when she was nervously overwrought.

“Yes.  Aunt Maria, who is it?”

“Hush, I don’t know.  He hasn’t paid any open court to anybody, that I know of, but—­I’ve seen him lookin’.”

“At whom?”

“At Ida Slome.”

“But she is younger than my mother was.”

“What difference do you s’pose that makes to a man.  He’ll like her all the better for that.  You can thank your stars he didn’t pitch on a school-girl, instead of the teacher.”

Maria lay stretched out stiff and motionless.  She was trying to bring her mind to bear upon the situation.  She was trying to imagine Miss Ida Slome, with her pink cheeks and her gay attire, in the house instead of her mother.  Her head began to reel.  She no longer wept.  She became dimly conscious, after a while, of her aunt Maria’s shaking her violently and calling her by name, but she did not respond, although she heard her plainly.  Then she felt a great jounce of the bed as her aunt sprang out.  She continued to lie still and rigid.  She somehow knew, however, that her aunt was lighting the lamp, then she felt, rather than saw, the flash of it across her face.  Her aunt Maria pulled on a wrapper over her night-gown, and hurried to the door.  “Harry, Harry Edgham!” she heard her call, and still Maria could not move.  Then she also felt, rather than saw, her father enter the room with his bath-robe slipped over his pajamas, and approach the bed.

“What on earth is the matter?” he said.  He also laid hands on Maria, and, at his touch, she became able to move.

“What on earth is the matter?” he asked again.

“She didn’t seem able to speak or move, and I was scared,” replied Aunt Maria, with a reproachful accent on the “I”; but Harry Edgham was too genuinely concerned at his little daughter’s white face and piteous look to heed that at all.

He leaned over and began stroking her soft little cheeks, and kissing her.  “Father’s darling,” he whispered.  Then he said over his shoulder to Aunt Maria, “I wish you would go into my room and get that flask of brandy I keep in my closet.”