Mr. Jonas White and Henry were a great alleviation of Maria’s desolate estate during her father’s absence.  Somehow, the men seemed to understand better than the women just how she felt:  that she would rather be let alone, now it was all over, than condoled with and pitied.  Mr. Henry White took one of the market horses, hitched him into a light buggy, and took Maria out riding two evenings, when the market was closed.  It was a warm November, and the moon was full.  Maria quite enjoyed her drive with Mr. Henry White, and he never said one word about her father’s marriage, and her new mother—­her pronoun of a mother—­all the way.  Mr. Henry White had too long a neck, and too large a mouth, which was, moreover, too firmly set, otherwise Maria felt that, with slight encouragement, she might fall in love with him, since he showed so much delicacy.  She counted up the probable difference in their ages, and estimated it as no more than was between her father and Her.  However, Mr. Henry White gave her so little encouragement, and his neck was so much too long above his collar, that she decided to put it out of her mind.

“Poor little thing,” Mr. Henry White said to his father, next day, “she’s about wild, with mother and Lill harping on it all the time.”

“They mean well,” said Mr. White.

“Of course they do; but who’s going to stand this eternal harping?  If women folks would only stop being so durned kind, and let folks alone sometimes, they’d be a durned sight kinder.”

“That’s so,” said Mr. Jonas White.

Maria’s father and his bride reached home about seven on the Monday night after Thanksgiving.  Maria re-entered her old home in the afternoon.  Miss Zella Holmes, who was another teacher of hers, went with her.  Ida had requested her to open the house.  Ida’s former boarding-house mistress had cooked a large turkey, and made some cakes and pies and bread.  Miss Zella Holmes drove around for Maria in a livery carriage, and all these supplies were stowed in beside them.  On the way they stopped at the station for the new maid, whose train was due then.  She was a Hungarian girl, with a saturnine, almost savage visage.  Maria felt an awe of her, both because she was to be their maid, and they had never kept one, and because of her personality.

When they reached home, Miss Zella Holmes, who was very lively and quick in her ways, though not at all pretty, gave orders to the maid in a way which astonished Maria.  She was conscious of an astonishment at everything, which had not before possessed her.  She looked at the kitchen, the dining-room, the sitting-room, the parlor, all the old apartments, and it was exactly as if she saw old friends with new heads.  The sideboard in the dining-room glittered with the wedding silver and cut-glass.  New pictures hung on the sitting-room and parlor walls, beside the new paper.  Wedding gifts lay on the tables.  There had been many wedding gifts.  Miss Zella Holmes flew about the house, with the saturnine Hungarian in attendance.  Maria, at Miss Holmes’s bidding, began to lay the table.  She got out some new table-linen, napkins, and table-cloth, which had been a wedding present.  She set the table with some new china.  She looked, with a numb feeling, at her mother’s poor old blue-and-white dishes, which were put away on the top shelves.