“I will tell if you don’t do what you say you’ll do another time,” said she.

When they reached home, Ida had not returned, but she came in radiant some few minutes later.  She had read a paper on a famous man, for the pleasure and profit of the Edgham Woman’s Club, and she had received much applause and felt correspondingly elated.  Josephine had taken the baby up-stairs to a little room which had recently been fitted up for a nursery, and, not following her usual custom, Ida went in there after removing her outer wraps.  She stood in her blue cloth dress looking at the child with her usual air of radiant aloofness, seeming to shed her own glory, like a star, upon the baby, rather than receive its little light into the loving recesses of her own soul.  Josephine and also Maria were in a state of consternation.  They had discovered a large, sticky splash of molasses candy on the baby’s white embroidered cloak.  They had washed the baby’s sticky little face, but they did not know what was to be done about the cloak, which lay over a chair.  Josephine essayed, with a dexterous gesture, to so fold the cloak over that the stain would be for the time concealed.  But Ida Edgham had not been a school-teacher for nothing.  She saw the gesture, and immediately took up the cloak herself.

“Why, what is this on her cloak?” said she.

There was a miserable silence.

“It looks like molasses candy.  It is molasses candy,” said Ida.  “Josephine, did you give this child molasses candy?” Ida’s voice was entirely even, but there was something terrible about it.

Maria saw Josephine turn white.  “She wouldn’t have given her the candy if it hadn’t been for me,” said she.

Ida stood looking from one to the other.  Josephine’s face was white and scared, Maria’s impenetrable.

“If you ever give this child candy again, either of you,” said Ida, “you will never take her out again.”  Then she went out, still smiling.

Josephine looked at Maria with enormous gratitude.

“Say,” said she, “you’re a dandy.”

“You’re a cheat!” returned Maria, with scorn.

“I’m awful sorry I didn’t wait on the corner till four o’clock, honest.”

“You’d better be.”

“Say, but you be a dandy,” repeated Josephine.

Chapter XII

Maria began to be conscious of other and more vital seasons than those of the old earth on which she lived—­the seasons of the human soul.  Along with her own unconscious and involuntary budding towards bloom, the warm rush of the blood in her own veins, she realized the budding progress of the baby.  When little Evelyn was put into short frocks, and her little, dancing feet were shod with leather instead of wool, Maria felt a sort of delicious wonder, similar to that with which she watched a lilac-bush in the yard when its blossoms deepened in the spring.