tasy, would not
endure.

"Maria does not act natural, poor child," Ida said to Mrs. Voorhees.
"She hardly sheds a tear. Sometimes I fear that her father's marrying
again did wean her a little from him."

"She may have deep feelings," suggested Mrs. Voorhees. Mrs. Voorhees
was an exuberant blonde, with broad shallows of sentimentality
overflowing her mind.

"Perhaps she has," Ida assented, with a peculiar smile curling her
lips. Ida looked handsomer than ever in her mourning attire. The
black softened her beauty, instead of bringing it into bolder relief,
as is sometimes the case. Ida mourned Harry in a curious fashion. She
mourned the more pitifully because of the absence of any mourning at
all, in its truest sense. Ida had borne in upon her the propriety of
deep grief, and she, maintaining that attitude, cramped her very soul
because of its unnaturalness. She consoled herself greatly because of
what she esteemed her devotion to the man who was gone. She said to
herself, with a preen of her funereal crest, that she had been such a
wife to poor Harry as few men ever had possessed.

"Well, I have the consolation of thinking that I have done my duty,"
she said to Mrs. Voorhees.

"Of course you have, dear, and that is worth everything," responded
her friend.

"I did all I could to make his home attractive," said Ida, "and he
never had to wait for a meal. How pretty he thought those new
hangings in the parlor were! Poor Harry had an aesthetic sense, and I
did my best to gratify it. It is a consolation."

"Of course," said Mrs. Voorhees.

If Ida had known how Maria regarded those very red silk parlor
hangings she would have been incredulous. Maria thought to herself
how hard her poor father had worked, and how the other hangings,
which had been new at the time of Ida's marriage, could not have been
worn out. She wanted to tear down the filmy red things and stuff them
into the kitchen stove. When she found out that her father had saved
up nearly a thousand dollars for her, which was deposited to her
credit in the Edgham savings-bank, her heart nearly broke because of
that. She imagined her father going without things to save that
little pittance for her, and she hated the money. She said to herself
that she would never touch it. And yet she loved her father for
saving it for her with a very anguish of love.

Ida was manifestly surprised when Henry's will was read and she
learned of Maria's poor little legacy, but