“I don’t care about any,” said Maria, and she began to sob.

“Father’s baby,” said Harry.

She felt his chest heave, and realized that her father was weeping as well as she.

“Oh, father, I don’t want new paper,” she sobbed out, convulsively.  “Mother picked out that on my room, and—­and—­I am sorry I tore this off.”

“Never mind, darling,” said Harry.  He almost carried the child back to her own room.  “Now get to bed as soon as you can, dear,” he said.

After Maria, trembling and tearful, had undressed and was in bed, her father came back into the room.  He held a small lamp in one hand, and a tumbler with some wine in the other.

“Here is some of the wine your mother had,” said Harry.  “Now I want you to sit right up and drink this.”

“I—­don’t want it, father,” gasped Maria.

“Sit right up and drink it.”

Maria sat up.  The tumbler was a third full, and the wine was an old port.  Maria drank it.  Immediately her head began to swim; she felt in a sort of daze when her father kissed her, and bade her lie still and go right to sleep, and went out of the room.  She heard him, with sharpened hearing, enter her mother’s room.  She remembered about the paper, and the new furniture, and how she was to have a new mother, and how she had torn the paper, and how her own mother had never had such things, but she remembered through a delicious haze.  She felt a charming warmth pervade all her veins.  She was no longer unhappy.  Nothing seemed to matter.  She soon fell asleep.

As for Harry Edgham, he entered the empty room which he had occupied with his dead wife.  He set the lamp on the floor and approached the paper, which poor little Maria, in her fit of futile rebellion, had torn.  He carefully tore off still more, making a clean strip of the paper where Maria had made a ragged one.  When he had finished, it looked as if the paper had in reality dropped off because of carelessness in putting on.  He gathered up the pieces of paper and stood looking about the room.

There is something about an empty room, empty except of memories, but containing nothing besides, no materialities, no certainties as to the future, which is intimidating to one who stops and thinks.  Harry Edgham was not, generally speaking, of the sort who stop to think; but now he did.  The look of youth faded from his face.  Instead of the joy and triumph which had filled his heart and made it young again, came remembrance of the other woman, and something else, which resembled terror and dread.  For the first time he deliberated whether he was about to do a wise thing:  for the first time, the image of Ida Slome’s smiling beauty, which was ever evident to his fancy, produced in him something like doubt and consternation.  He looked about the room, and remembered the old pieces of furniture which had that day been carried away.  He looked at the places where they had stood.