which Maria privately wondered. The teacher seemed to her too old to
wear pink. She thought she ought wear black like her mother. Miss
Slome's pink dress had knots of black velvet about it which
accentuated it, even as Miss Slome's face was accentuated by the
clear darkness of her eyes and the black puff of her hair above her
finely arched brows. Her cheeks were of the sweetest red--not pink
but red--which seemed a further tone of the pink of her attire, and
she wore a hat encircled with a wreath of red roses. Maria thought
that she should have worn a bonnet. Maria felt an odd sort of
instinctive antagonism for her. She wondered why Wollaston looked at
the teacher so instead of at herself. She gave her head a charming
cant, and glanced again, but the boy still had his eyes fixed upon
the elder woman, with that rapt expression which is seen only in the
eyes of a boy upon an older woman, and which is primeval, involving
the adoration and awe of womanhood itself. The boy had not reached
the age when he was capable of falling in love, but he had reached
the age of adoration, and there was nothing in little Maria Edgham in
her pink gingham, with her shy, sidelong glances, to excite it. She
was only a girl, the other was a goddess. His worship of the teacher
interfered with Wollaston's studies. He was wondering as he sat there
if he could not walk home with her that night, if by chance any _man_
would be in waiting for her. How he hated that imaginary man. He
glanced around, and as he did so, the door opened softly, and Harry
Edgham, Maria's father, entered. He was very late, but he had waited
in the vestibule, in order not to attract attention, until the people
began singing a hymn, "Jesus, Lover of my Soul," to the tune of "When
the Swallows Homeward Fly." He was a distinctly handsome man. He
looked much younger than Maria's mother, his wife. People said that
Harry Edgham's wife might, from her looks, have been his mother. She
was a tall, dark, rather harsh-featured woman. In her youth she had