Maria stood on the dusty sidewalk in the glare of electric light, and waited.  Her pink gingham dress was quite short, but she held it up daintily, like a young lady, pinching a fold between her little thumb and forefinger.  Mrs. Jasper Cone, with another woman, came up, and to Maria’s astonishment, Mrs. Cone stopped, clasped her in her arms and kissed her.  As she did so, she sobbed, and Maria felt her tears of bereavement on her cheek with an odd mixture of pity and awe and disgust.  “If my Minnie had—­lived, she might have grown up to be like her,” she gasped out to her friend.  “I always thought she looked like her.”  The friend made a sympathetic murmur of assent.  Mrs. Cone kissed Maria again, holding her little form to her crape-trimmed bosom almost convulsively, then the two passed on.  Maria heard her say again that she always had thought the baby looked like her, and she felt humiliated.  She looked after the poor mother’s streaming black veil with resentment.  Then Miss Ida Slome passed by, and Wollaston Lee was clinging to her arm, pressing as closely to her side as he dared.  Miss Slome saw Maria, and spoke in her sweet, crisp tone.  “Good-evening, Maria,” said she.

Maria stood gazing after them.  Her father emerged from the store with the bag of peaches dangling from his hand.  He looked incongruous.  Her father had too much the air of a gentleman to carry a paper bag.  “I do hope your mother will like these peaches,” he said.

Maria walked along with her father, and she thought with pain and scorn how singular it was for a boy to want to go home with an old woman like Miss Slome, when there were little girls like her.

Chapter II

Maria and her father entered the house, which was not far.  It was a quite new Queen Anne cottage of the better class, situated in a small lot of land, and with other houses very near on either side.  There was a great clump of hydrangeas on the small smooth lawn in front, and on the piazza stood a small table, covered with a dainty white cloth trimmed with lace, on which were laid, in ostentatious neatness, the evening paper and a couple of magazines.  There were chairs, and palms in jardinieres stood on either side of the flight of wooden steps.

Maria’s mother was, however, in the house, seated beside the sitting-room table, on which stood a kerosene lamp with a singularly ugly shade.  She was darning stockings.  She held the stocking in her left hand, and drew the thread through regularly.  Her mouth was tightly closed, which was indicative both of decision of character and pain.  Her countenance looked sallower than ever.  She looked up at her husband and little girl entering.  “Well,” she said, “so you’ve got home.”

“I’ve brought you some peaches, Abby,” said Harry Edgham.  He laid the bag on the table, and looked anxiously at his wife.  “How do you feel now?” said he.

“I feel well enough,” said she.  Her reply sounded ill-humored, but she did not intend it to be so.  She was far from being ill-humored.  She was thinking of her husband’s kindness in bringing the peaches.  But she looked at the paper bag on the table sharply.  “If there is a soft peach in that bag,” said she, “and there’s likely to be, it will stain the table-cover, and I can never get it out.”