It was decided that Maria should go and visit her aunt Maria, in New England, and remain there all summer.  Her father would pay her board in order that she should not be any restraint on her aunt, with her scant income.  Just before Maria went, and just before her school closed, the broad gossip of the school came to her ears.  She ascertained something which filled her at once with awe, and shame, and jealousy, and indignation.  If one of the girls began to speak to her about it, she turned angrily away.  She fairly pushed Gladys Mann one day.  Gladys turned and looked at her with loving reproach, like a chidden dog.  “What did you expect?” said she.  Maria ran away, her face burning.

After she reached her aunt Maria’s nothing was said to her about it.  Aunt Maria was too prudish and too indignant.  Uncle Henry’s wife, Aunt Eunice, was away all summer, taking care of a sister who was ill with consumption in New Hampshire; so Aunt Maria kept the whole house, and she and Maria and Uncle Henry had their meals together.  Maria loved her uncle Henry.  He was a patient man, with a patience which at times turns to fierceness, of a man with a brain above his sphere, who has had to stand and toil in a shoe-factory for his bread and butter all his life.  He was non-complainant because of a sort of stern pride, and a sense of a just cause against Providence, but he was very kind to Maria; he petted her as if she had been his own child.  Every pleasant night Uncle Henry took Maria for a trolley-ride, or a walk, and he treated her to ice-cream soda and candy.  Aunt Maria also took good care of the child.  She showed a sort of vicious curiosity with regard to Maria’s step-mother and all the new household arrangements, which Maria did not gratify.  She had too much loyalty, although she longed to say all that she thought to her aunt, being sure of a violent sympathizer.

“Well, I’ll say one thing, she has fixed your clothes nice,” said Aunt Maria.

“She didn’t do it, it was Miss Barnes,” replied Maria.  She could not help saying that much.  She did not want Aunt Maria to think her step-mother took better care of her wardrobe than her own mother had done.

“Good land!  She didn’t hire all these things made?” said Aunt Maria.

“Yes’m.”

“Good land!  I don’t see how your father is going to stand it.  I’d like to know what your poor mother would have said?” said Aunt Maria.

Then Maria’s loyalty came to the front.  After all, she was her father’s wife, and to be defended.

“I guess maybe father is making more money now,” said she.

“Well, I hope to the land he is,” said Aunt Maria.  “I guess if She (Aunt Maria also treated Ida like a pronoun) had just one hundred dollars and no more to get along with, she’d have to do different.”

Maria regained her strength rapidly.  When she went home, a few days before her school begun, in September, she was quite rosy and blooming.  She had also fallen in love with a boy who lived next to Aunt Maria, and who asked her, over the garden fence, to correspond with him, the week before she left.