mmodest, to care so
much about a man who has never said he cared about me?"

"He has never said anything?" asked Maria, and her voice sounded
strange in her own ears.

"No, never one word that I could make anything of, but he has looked
at me, he has, honest, sister." Evelyn burst into fresh sobs.

Then Maria roused herself. She patted the little, soft, dark head.

"Why, Evelyn, precious," she said, "you are imagining all this. You
can't care so much about a man whom you have seen so little. You have
let your mind dwell on it, and you imagine it. You don't care. You
can't, really. You wait, and by-and-by you will find out that you
care a good deal more for somebody else."

But then Evelyn raised herself and looked down at her sister in the
dark, and there was a ring in her voice which Maria had never before
heard. "Not care," she said--"not care! I will stand everything but
that. Maria, don't you dare tell me I don't care!"

"But you don't know him at all, dear."

"I know him better than anybody else in the whole world," said
Evelyn, still in the same strained voice. "The very minute I saw him
I loved him, and then it seemed as if a great bright light made him
plain to me. I do love him, Maria. Don't you ever dare say I don't.
That is the only thing that makes me feel that I am not ashamed to
live, the knowing that I do love him. I should be dreadful if I
didn't love him--really love him, I mean, with the love that lasts.
Do you suppose that if I only felt about him as some of the other
girls do, that I would have told you? I _do_ love him!"

"What makes you so sure?"

"What makes me so sure? Why, everything. I know there is not another
man in the whole world for me that can possibly equal him, and
then--I feel as if my whole life were full of him. I can't seem to
remember much before he came. When I look back, it is like looking
into the dark, and I can't imagine the world being at all without
him."

"Would you be willing to be very poor, to go without pretty things if
you--married him, to live in a house like the Ramsey's on the other
side of the river, not to have enough to eat and drink and wear?"

"I would have enough to eat and drink and wear. I would have as much
as a queen if I had him," cried Evelyn. "What do you think I care
about pretty things, or even food and life itself, when it comes to
anything like this? Live in a house like the Ramsey's! I would live
in a cave. I would live on the street,