she touched her cool red
lips to Maria's cheek and told her how glad she was. "It will be a
little nest-egg for you," she said, "and it will buy your trousseau.
And, of course, you will always feel at perfect liberty to come here
whenever you wish to do so. Your room will be kept just as it is."

Maria thanked her, but she detected an odd ring of insincerity in
Ida's voice. After she went to bed that night she speculated as to
what it meant. Evelyn was not with her. Ida had insisted that she
should occupy her own room.

"You will keep each other awake," she said.

Evelyn had grown noticeably thin and pale in a few days. The child
had adored her father. Often, at the table, she would look at his
vacant place, and push away her plate, and sob. Ida had become mildly
severe with her on account of it.

"My dear child," she said, "of course we all feel just as you do, but
we control ourselves. It is the duty of those who live to control
themselves."

"I want my papa!" sobbed Evelyn convulsively.

"You had better go away from the table, dear," said Ida calmly. "I
will have a plate of dinner kept warm for you, and by-and-by when you
feel like it, you can go down to the kitchen and Agnes will give it
to you."

In fact, poor little Evelyn, who was only a child and needed her
food, did steal down to the kitchen about nine o'clock and got her
plate of dinner. But she was more satisfied by Agnes bursting into
tears and talking about her "blissed father that was gone, and how
there was niver a man like him," and actually holding her in her
great lap while she ate. It was a meal seasoned with tears, but also
sweetened with honest sympathy. Evelyn, when she slipped up the back
stairs to her own room after her supper, longed to go into her
sister's room and sleep with her, but she did not dare. Her little
bed was close to the wall, against which, on the other side, Maria's
bed stood, and once Evelyn distinctly heard a sob. She sobbed too,
but softly, lest her mother hear. Evelyn felt that she and Maria and
Agnes were the only ones who really mourned for her father, although
she viewed her mother in her mourning robes with a sort of awe, and a
feeling that she must believe in a grief on her part far beyond hers
and Maria's. Ida had obtained a very handsome mourning wardrobe for
both herself and Evelyn, and had superintended Maria's. Maria paid
for her clothes out of her small earnings, however. Ida had her
dress-maker's bill ma