Again the boy scowled at Maria, who did not understand; but she would not have her father reviled.

“He isn’t, so there!” she said.

“He’s going to marry teacher.”

“I don’t see as he is mean if he is,” said Maria, forced into justice by injustice.

“I was going to marry her myself, if she’d only waited, and he hadn’t butted in,” said Wollaston.

The boy gave one last scowl at the little girl, and it was as if he scowled at all womanhood in her.  Then he gave a fling away, and ran like a wild thing across the field of golden-rod and queen’s-lace.  Maria, watching, saw him throw himself down prone in the midst of the wild-flowers, and she understood that he was crying because the teacher was going to marry her father.  She went on, walking like a little old woman, and she had a feeling as if she had found a road in the world that led outside all love.

Chapter VI

Maria felt that she no longer cared about Wollaston Lee, that she fairly scorned him.  Then, suddenly, something occurred to her.  She turned, and ran back as fast as she could, her short fleece of golden hair flying.  She wrapped her short skirts about her, and wormed through the barbed-wire fence which skirted the field—­the boy had leaped it, but she was not equal to that—­and she hastened, leaving a furrow through the white-and-gold herbage, to the boy lying on his face weeping.  She stood over him.

“Say?” said she.

The boy gave a convulsive wriggle of his back and shoulders, and uttered an inarticulate “Let me alone”; but the girl persisted.

“Say?” said she again.

Then the boy turned, and disclosed a flushed, scowling face among the flowers.

“Well, what do you want, anyway?” said he.

“If you want to marry Miss Slome, why don’t you, instead of my father?” inquired Maria, bluntly, going straight to the point.

“I haven’t got any money,” replied Wollaston, crossly; “all a woman thinks of is money.  How’d I buy her dresses?”

“I don’t believe but your father would be willing for you to live at home with her, and buy her dresses, till you got so you could earn yourself.”

“She wouldn’t have me,” said the boy, and he fairly dug his flushed face into the mass of wild-flowers.

“You are a good deal younger than father,” said Maria.

“Your father he can give her a diamond ring, and I haven’t got more’n forty cents, and I don’t believe that would buy much of anything,” said Wollaston, in muffled tones of grief and rage.

Maria felt a shock at the idea of a diamond ring.  Her mother had never owned one.

“Oh, I don’t believe father will ever give her a diamond ring in the world,” said she.

“She’s wearing one, anyhow—­I saw it,” said Wollaston.  “Where did she get it if he didn’t give it to her, I’d like to know?”