It was not very lively for Maria during those evenings. She felt
afraid to go to bed and leave the house alone except for the heavily
sleeping woman, whom her father had hard work to rouse when he
returned, and who staggered out of the door, when she started home,
as if she were drunk. She herself never felt sleepy; it was even hard
for her to sleep when at last her father had returned and she went to
bed. Often after she had fallen asleep her heart seemed to sting her
awake.

Maria grew thinner than ever. Somebody called Harry Edgham's
attention to the fact, and he got some medicine for her to take. But
it was not medicine which she needed--that is, not medicine for the
body, but for the soul. What probably stung her most keenly was the
fact that certain improvements, for which her mother had always
longed but always thought she could not have, were being made in the
house. A bay-window was being built in the parlor, and one over it,
in the room which had been her father's and mother's, and which Maria
dimly realized was, in the future, to be Miss Ida Slome's. Maria's
mother had always talked a good deal about some day having that
bay-window. Maria reflected that her father could have afforded it
just as well in her mother's day, if her mother had insisted upon it,
like Miss Slome. Maria's mother had been of the thrifty New England
kind, and had tried to have her husband save a little. Maria knew
well enough that these savings were going into the improvements, the
precious dollars which her poor mother had enabled her father to save
by her own deprivations and toil. Maria heard her father and Miss
Slome talk about the maid they were to have; Miss Slome would never
dream of doing her own work, as her predecessor had done. All these
things the child dwelt upon in a morbid, aged fashion, and,