Harry Edgham looked at Ida Slome with as innocent admiration as another woman might have done.  Then he looked again at his daughter’s little flower-like head, and a feeling of love made his heart warm.  Maria could sing herself, but she was afraid.  Once in a while she droned out a sweet, husky note, then her delicate cheeks flushed crimson as if all the people had heard her, when they had not heard at all, and she turned her head, and gazed out of the open window at the plumed darkness.  She thought again with annoyance how she would have to go with her father, and Wollaston Lee would not dare accost her, even if he were so disposed; then she took a genuine pleasure in the window space of sweet night and the singing.  Her passions were yet so young that they did not disturb her long if interrupted.  She was also always conscious of the prettiness of her appearance, and she loved herself for it with that love which brings previsions of unknown joys of the future.  Her charming little face, in her realization of it, was as the untried sword of the young warrior which is to bring him all the glory of earth for which his soul longs.

After the meeting was closed, and Harry Edgham, with his little daughter lagging behind him with covert eyes upon Wollaston Lee, went out of the vestry, a number inquired for his wife.  “Oh, she is very comfortable,” he replied, with his cheerful optimism which solaced him in all vicissitudes, except the single one of actually witnessing the sorrow and distress of those who belonged to him.

“I heard,” said one man, who was noted in the place for his outspokenness, which would have been brutal had it not been for his naivete—­“I heard she wasn’t going to get out again.”

“Nonsense,” replied Harry Edgham.

“Then she is?”

“Of course she is.  She would have come to meeting to-night if it had not been so damp.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said the man, with a curious congratulation which gave the impression of disappointment.

Little Maria Edgham and her father went up the village street; Harry Edgham walked quite swiftly.  “I guess we had better hurry along,” he observed, “your mother is all alone.”

Maria tagged behind him.  Her father had to stop at a grocery-store on the corner of the street where they lived, to get a bag of peaches which he had left there.  “I got some peaches on my way,” he explained, “and I didn’t want to carry them to church.  I thought your mother might like them.  The doctor said she might eat fruit.”  With that he darted into the store with the agility of a boy.