ievances and disappointments to pay much attention to her little
niece. "Yes, courtin'," she said, harshly. "I've been suspectin' for
some time, an' now I know. A man, when he's left a widower, don't
smarten up the way he's done for nothin'; I know it." Aunt Maria
nodded her head aggressively, with a gesture almost of butting.

Maria continued to gaze at her, with that pale, almost idiotic
expression. It was a fact that she had thought of her father as being
as much married as ever, even although her mother was dead. Nothing
else had occurred to her.

"Your father's thinkin' of gettin' married again," said Aunt Maria,
"and you may as well make up your mind to it, poor child." The words
were pitying, the tone not.

"Who?" gasped Maria.

"I don't know any more than you do," replied Aunt Maria, "but I know
it's somebody." Suddenly Aunt Maria arose. It seemed to her that she
must do something vindictive. Here she had to return to her solitary
life in her New England village, and her hundred dollars a year,
which somehow did not seem as great a glory to her as it had formerly
done. She went to the parlor windows and closed them with jerks, then
she blew out the lamp. "Come," said she, "it's time to go to bed. I'm
tired, for my part. I've worked like a dog all day. Your father has
got his key, an' he can let himself in when he gets through his
courtin'."

Maria crept miserably--she was still in a sort of daze--up-stairs
after Aunt Maria.

"Well, good-night," said Aunt Maria. "You might as well make up your
mind to it. I suppose it had to come, and maybe it's all for the
best." Aunt Maria's voice sounded as if she were trying to reconcile
the love of God with the existence of hell and eternal torment. She
closed her door with a slam. There are, in some New England women,
impulses of fierce childishness.

Maria, when she was in her room, had never felt so lonely in her
life. A kind of rage of loneliness possessed her. She slipped out of
her clothes and went to bed, and then she lay awake. She heard her
father when he returned. The clock on a church which was near by
struck twelve soon after. Maria tried to imagine another woman in the
house in her mother's place; she thought of every eligible woman in
Edgham whom her father might select to fill that place, but her
little-girl ideas of eligibility were at fault. She thought only of
women of her mother's age and staidness, who wore bonnets. She could
think of only two,