"Oh, I can finish that in school to-morrow. I don't feel like working any more to-night, and I do feel like reading the paper."

"Won't it tire you, dear?"

"Tire me? Now, father, what do you take me for?" Maria settled herself in a chair. Harry leaned back his head contentedly; he had always like to be read to, and lately reading to himself had hurt his eyes. "Now, what shall I read, father?" she said.

Poor Harry, remembering his own futile investments, asked for the stock-list, and Maria read it very intelligently for a young girl who knew nothing about stocks.

"Once I owned some of that stock," said Harry, proudly.

"Did you, father?" Maria responded, admiringly.

"Yes, and only look where it is now! If I could only have held on to it, I might have been quite a rich man."

Harry spoke, oddly enough, with no regret. Such was the childishness of the man that a possession once his never seemed wholly lost to him. It seemed to him that he had reason to be proud of having made such a wise investment, even if he had never actually reaped any benefit from it.

"I don't see how you knew what to invest in," Maria said, fostering his pride.

"Oh, I had to study the stock-lists and ask brokers," Harry replied.

He looked brighter. This little reinstatement in his self-esteem acted like a tonic. In some fashion Ida always kept him alive to his own deficiencies, and that was not good for a man who was naturally humble-minded. Harry sat up straighter. He looked at Maria with brighter eyes as she continued reading. "Now _that_ is a good investment," said he--"that bond. If I had the money to spare I would buy one of those bonds to-morrow morning."

"Are bonds better than stocks, father?" asked Maria.

"Yes," replied Harry, importantly. "Always remember that, if you have any money to invest. A man can afford to buy stocks, because he has better opportunities of judging of the trend of the market, but bonds are always safer for a woman."

Maria regarded her father again with that innocent admiration for his wisdom, which seemed to act like a nerve stimulant. A subtle physician might possibly have reached the conclusion, had he been fully aware of all the circ.u.mstances, that Ida, with her radiant superiority, her voiceless but none the less positive self-a.s.sertion over her husband, was actually a means of spiritual depression which had reacted upon his physical nature. n.o.body knows exactly to what extent any of us are responsible for the lives of others, and how far our mere existences may be derogatory to our fellow-beings. Harry was visibly brighter.

"You don't look half as tired as you did, father," Maria said.

"I don't feel so tired," replied Harry. "It has rested me to hear you read. Remember what I have told you, dear, about bonds--always bonds, and never stocks, for a woman."

"Yes, father," said Maria. Then she added, "I am going to save all I can when I begin to earn."

"Your aunt Maria will only ask you enough board to make it possible for her to pay the bills? You know she has only a hundred a year to live on. Of course your uncle Henry lets her have her rent free, or she couldn't do it, but she is a fine manager. She manages very much as your mother did." As he spoke, Harry looked around the luxurious apartment and reflected that, had his first wife lived, he himself could have saved, and there might have been no need for this little, delicate girl to earn her own living. He sighed, and the weary look settled over his face again.

Maria rose. "Father," said she, "Annie has gone out, and so has Hannah, and I am going out in the kitchen and make a cup of that thick chocolate that you like, for you."

"It is too much trouble, dear."

"Nonsense!" said Maria. "I would like to do it, and it won't take a minute. There is a good fire in the range."

While Maria was gone, Harry sat gazing out of the window. He had always now, when he looked out of a window, the sensation of a man who was pa.s.sing in rapid motion all the old familiar objects, all the landmarks of his life, or rather--for one never rids one's self of that particular optical delusion--it was as if they were pa.s.sing. The conviction of one's own transit is difficult to achieve. Harry gazed out of the window, and it was to him as if the familiar trees which bordered the sidewalk, the shrubs in the yard, the houses which were within view, were flitting past him in a mad whirl. He was glad when Maria entered with the chocolate, in his own particular cup, and a dainty plate of cheese sandwiches.

"I thought perhaps you could eat a sandwich, father," she said. "I don't believe you had anything decent for lunch in New York."

"I didn't have much," said Harry. He did not add, what was the truth, that lately he had been stinting himself on his luncheons in the effort to save a little more of his earnings. He ate nearly all the sandwiches, and drank two cups of chocolate, and really looked much better.

"You need more nourishment, father," said Maria, with a wise, maternal air, which was also half accusatory, and which made Harry think so strongly of his first wife that he regarded Maria as he might have regarded her mother.

"You grow more and more like your own mother, dear," he said.

"Well, I am glad of that," replied Maria. "Mother was a good woman.

If I can only be half as good as mother was."

"Your mother _was_ a good woman," said Harry, reflectively; and as he spoke he seemed to feel the arms of strong, almost stern, feminity and faithfulness which had encompa.s.sed his childlike soul for so many years. He owned to himself that Maria's mother had been a much more suitable wife for him than this other woman. Then he had a little qualm of remorse, for Ida came in sight, richly dressed and elegant, as usual, with Evelyn dancing along beside her. Mrs. Adams was with her. Mrs. Adams was talking and Ida was smiling. It was more becoming to Ida to smile than to talk. She had discovered long since that she had not so very much to say, and that her smiles were better coin of her little realm; she therefore generally employed them in preference.

Maria got up hastily and took the tray and the chocolate-cups. "I guess Mrs. Adams is coming in," said she.

"You didn't make enough chocolate to give them?" Harry said, hesitatingly.

"No," replied Maria, and her tone was a little curt even to her father. "And I used up the last bit of chocolate in the house, too."

Then she scudded out of the room with her tray and pa.s.sed the front door as the sound of Ida's latch-key was heard in the lock. Maria set her tray on the kitchen-table and hurried up the back stairs to her own room. She entered it and locked both doors, the one communicating with the hall and the one which connected it with Evelyn's room. She had no sooner done so than she heard the quick patter of little feet, and the door leading into Evelyn's room was tried, then violently shaken. "Let me in, sister; let me in," cried the sweet little flute of a voice on the other side. Evelyn could now talk plainly, but she still kept to her baby appellation for her sister.

"No, darling, sister can't let you in now," replied Maria.

"Why not? Let me in, sister."

"Sister is going to study," said Maria, in a firm voice. "She can't have Evelyn. Run down-stairs, darling; run down to mamma."

"Evelyn don't want mamma. Evelyn wants sister."

"Papa is down there, too. Put on your clothes, like a nice girl, and show papa how smart you can be; then run down."

"Evelyn can't b.u.t.ton up her dress."

"Put everything on but that, then run down, and mamma can do it for you."

"Let me in, sister."

"No, dear," Maria said again. "Evelyn can't come in now."

There came a little whimper of grief and anger which cut Maria's heart, but she was firm. She could not have even Evelyn then. She had to be alone with the knowledge she had just gained of her father's state of health. She sat down in her little chair by the window; it was her own baby chair, which she had kept all these years, and in which she could still sit comfortably, she was so slender. Then she put her face in her hands and began to weep. She had never wept as she did then, not even when her mother died. She was so much younger when her mother died that her sensibilities had not acquired their full ac.u.men; then, too, she had not had at that time the awful foretaste of a desolate future which tinctured with bitter her very soul. Somehow, although Maria had noticed for a long time that her father did not look as he had done, it had never occurred to her that that which had happened to her mother could happen to her father. She had been like one in a house which has been struck by lightning, and had been rendered thereby incredulous of a second stroke. It had not occurred to her that whereas she had lost her mother, she could also lose her father. It seemed like too heavy a hammer-stroke of Providence to believe in and keep her reason. She had thought that her father was losing his youth, that his hair turning gray had much to do with his altered looks. She had never thought of death. It seemed to her monstrous. A rage against Providence, like nothing which she had known before, was over her. Why should she lose everything? What had she done? She reviewed her past life, and she defended herself like Job, with her summary of self-righteousness.

She had always done right, so far as she knew. Her sins had been so petty as hardly to deserve the name of sins. She remembered how she had once enjoyed seeing her face in her looking-gla.s.s, how she had liked pretty, new dresses, and she could not make that seem very culpable. She remembered how, although she had never loved her step-mother, she had observed, except on that one occasion when Evelyn was lost, the utmost respect and deference for her--how she had been, after the first, even willing to love her had she met with the slightest encouragement. She could not honestly blame herself for her carefully concealed att.i.tude of disapproval towards Ida, for she said to herself, with a subtlety which was strange for a girl so young, that she had merited it, that she was a cold, hard, self-centred woman, not deserving love, and that she had in reality been injurious for her father. She was convinced that, had her own mother lived, with her half-censorious yet wholly loving care for him, he might still have preserved his youth and his handsome boyishness and health. She thought of the half-absurd, half-tragic secret which underlay her life, and she could not honestly think herself very much to blame for that. She always thought of that with bewilderment, as one might think of some dimly remembered vagary of delirium. Sometimes it seemed to her now that it could not be true.

Maria realized that she was full of self-righteousness, but she was also honest. She saw no need for her to blame herself for faults which she had not committed. She thought of the doctrine which she had heard, that children were wholly evil from their birth, and it did not seem to her true. She could _say_ that she had been wholly evil from her birth, but she felt that she should, if she did say so, tell a lie to G.o.d and herself. She honestly could not see why, for any fault of hers, her father should die. Then suddenly her mind gave a leap from her own standing-point to that of her father. She suddenly reflected that it was not wholly her own grief for his loss which was to be considered, but her father's grief at quitting the world wherein he had dwelt so long, and his old loves of life. She reflected upon his possible fear of the Unknown into which he was to go. There was in Maria's love for her father, as there had been in her mother's, a strong element of the maternal. She thought of her father with infinite pity, as one might think of a little child about to go on a long, strange journey to an unknown place, all alone by himself. It seemed to her an awful thing for G.o.d to ask one like her father to die a lingering death, to realize it all fully, what he had to do, then to go off by himself, alone. She remembered what she had heard from the pulpit on Sundays, but somehow that Unknown seemed so frightfully wide and vast for a soul like her father's, which had always been so like the soul of a child, to find her mother in. Then she got some comfort from the memory of her mother, of her great strength. It seemed to her that her mother, wherever she was, would not let her father wander alone very long. That she would meet him with that love and chiding which is sometimes the very concert-pitch of love itself, its key-note, and lead him into those green pastures and beside those still waters of the Psalmist. Maria, at that moment, got more comfort from her memory of the masterliness of her mother, whom she had known, than from her conception of G.o.d, towards whom her soul reached out, it is true, but whom it no more comprehended than a flower comprehends the sun. The very love of G.o.d needs a human trellis whereby His creatures can reach Him, and Maria now climbed towards a trust in Him, by the reflection of her mother's love, and strength in spite of love.

Then racking pity for herself and her own loss, and rage because of it, and a pity for her father which almost roused her to a fury of rebellion, again swept away every other consideration.

"Poor father! poor father!" she sobbed, under her breath. "There he is going to die, and he hasn't got mother to take care of him! _She_ won't do anything. She will try not to smile, that is all. And I can't do anything, the way mother could. Father don't want me to even act as if I knew it; but if mother were alive he would tell her, and she would help him." Then Maria thought of herself, poor, solitary, female thing travelling the world alone, for she never thought, at that time, of her marriage being anything which would ever be a marriage in reality, but as of something which cast her outside the pale of possibilities and made her more solitary still, and she wept silently, or as silently as she could; once in awhile a murmur of agony or a sob escaped her. She could not help it. She got up out of her little chair and flung herself on the floor, and fairly writhed with the pain of her awful grief and sense of loss. She became deaf to any sound; all her senses seemed to have failed her. She was alive only to that sense of grief which is the primeval sense of the world--the grief of existence itself and the necessity of death and loss.

All at once she felt a little, soft touch, and another little, weeping, human thing, born like herself to all the awful chances of love and grief, flung itself down beside her.

Maria had locked her doors, but she had forgotten her window, which opened on an upper balcony, and was easily accessible to any one climbing out of the hall window. Evelyn had been listening at her door and had heard her sobs. Knowing from experience that her sister meant what she said, she had climbed out of the hall window, scudded along the little balcony, and into Maria's window. She flung herself down on the floor, and wept so violently that Maria was alarmed.

"Why, baby, darling, what is it? Tell sister," she said, hushing her own sobs.

The child continued to sob. Her whole little frame was shaken convulsively.

"Tell sister," whispered Maria.