sense his
ignorance was pathetic. He had honestly thought that the pretty,
strange girl must like his close contact, and he felt aggrieved that
this other young man, who did not smell of leather and carried no
dinner-pail, had ousted him. He viewed Maria's delicate profile with
a sort of angry tenderness.

"Say, she's a beaut, ain't she?" whispered the man beside him, with a
malicious grin, and again got a surly growl in response.

Maria finally, much to her aunt's delight, said to George that they
had been shopping, and thanked him for the articles which his money
had enabled them to buy.

"The poor little thing can go to school now," said Maria. There was
gratitude in her voice, and yet, oddly enough, still a tinge of
reproach.

"If mother and I had dreamed of the true state of affairs we would
have done something before," George Ramsey said, with an accent of
apology; and yet he could not see for the life of him why he should
be apologetic for the poverty of these degenerate relatives of his.
He could not see why he was called upon to be his brother's keeper in
this case, but there was something about Maria's serious, accusing
gaze of blue eyes, and her earnest voice, that made him realize that
he could prostrate himself before her for uncommitted sins. Somehow,
Maria made him feel responsible for all that he might have done wrong
as well as his actual wrong-doing, although he laughed at himself for
his mental attitude. Suddenly a thought struck him. "When are you
going to take all these things (how you ever managed to get so much
for ten dollars I don't understand) to the child?" he asked, eagerly.

Maria replied, unguardedly, that she intended to take them after
supper that night. "Then she will have them all ready for Monday,"
she said.

"Then let me go with you and carry the parcels," George Ramsey said,
eagerly.

Maria stiffened. "Thank you," she said, "but Uncle Henry is going
with me, and there is no need."

Maria felt her aunt Eunice give a sudden start and make an
inarticulate murmur of remonstrance, then she checked herself. Maria
knew that her uncle walked a mile from his factory to save car-fare;
she knew also that she was telling what was practically an untruth,
since she had made no agreement with her uncle to accompany her.

"I should be happy to go with you," said George Ramsey, in a boyish,
abashed voice.

Maria said nothing more. She looked past her aunt out of the window.
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