It was not very lively for Maria during those evenings.  She felt afraid to go to bed and leave the house alone except for the heavily sleeping woman, whom her father had hard work to rouse when he returned, and who staggered out of the door, when she started home, as if she were drunk.  She herself never felt sleepy; it was even hard for her to sleep when at last her father had returned and she went to bed.  Often after she had fallen asleep her heart seemed to sting her awake.

Maria grew thinner than ever.  Somebody called Harry Edgham’s attention to the fact, and he got some medicine for her to take.  But it was not medicine which she needed—­that is, not medicine for the body, but for the soul.  What probably stung her most keenly was the fact that certain improvements, for which her mother had always longed but always thought she could not have, were being made in the house.  A bay-window was being built in the parlor, and one over it, in the room which had been her father’s and mother’s, and which Maria dimly realized was, in the future, to be Miss Ida Slome’s.  Maria’s mother had always talked a good deal about some day having that bay-window.  Maria reflected that her father could have afforded it just as well in her mother’s day, if her mother had insisted upon it, like Miss Slome.  Maria’s mother had been of the thrifty New England kind, and had tried to have her husband save a little.  Maria knew well enough that these savings were going into the improvements, the precious dollars which her poor mother had enabled her father to save by her own deprivations and toil.  Maria heard her father and Miss Slome talk about the maid they were to have; Miss Slome would never dream of doing her own work, as her predecessor had done.  All these things the child dwelt upon in a morbid, aged fashion, and, consequently, while her evenings with Mrs. Addix were not enjoyable, they were not exactly dull.  Nearly every room in the house was being newly papered and painted.  Maria and Mrs. Addix sat first in one room, then in another, as one after another was torn up in the process of improvement.  Generally the room which they occupied was chaotic with extra furniture, and had a distracted appearance which grated terribly upon the child’s nerves.  Only her own room was not touched.  “You shall have your room all fixed up next year,” her father told her.  “I would have it done now, but father is going to considerable expense as it is.”  Maria assured him, with a sort of wild eagerness, that she did not want her room touched.  It seemed to her that if the familiar paper which her mother had selected were changed for something else, and the room altered, that the last vestige of home would disappear, that she could not bear it.

“Well,” said Harry, easily, “your paper will do very well, I guess, for a while longer; but father will have your room fixed up another year.  You needn’t think you are going to be slighted.”