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As she spoke, she went over to him, took the frying-pan out of his hands, and carried it over to the sink. "She is a very sick woman," replied Harry Edgham, looking at Mrs. White with a measure of gratitude. "You've got Dr. Williams and Miss Bell, Maria says?" "Yes." "Maria says her aunt is coming?" "Yes, I sent a telegram." "Well, I'll stay till she gets here," said Mrs.
She recognized the woman at once. She was a trained nurse who lived in Edgham. "They have got Miss Bell," she thought; "mother must be awful sick." She knew that Miss Bell's wages were twenty-five dollars a week, and that her father would not have called her in except in an extreme case. She watched her father help out the woman, who was stout and middle-aged, and much larger than he.
"She looks real pale and acts all tired out." "I guess she'll survive it," said Aunt Maria, pouring the coffee. "Don't you think I had better make some toast and a cup of tea for her, if she does say she doesn't want any breakfast?" "Maria Edgham is old enough to know her own mind, and if she says she don't want any breakfast I'd let her go without till she was hungry," said Aunt Maria.
She and her father were invited to take tea at Miss Slome's boarding-house, and after tea they sat in the little parlor which the teacher had for her own, and Miss Slome sang and played to them. She had a piano. Maria heard her and her father talking about the place in the Edgham parlor where it was to stand.
Her aunt Maria arrived on the train expected, and she entered the house, preceded by the cabman bearing her little trunk, which she had had ever since she was a little girl. It was the only trunk she had ever owned. Both physicians and the nurse were with Mrs. Edgham when her sister arrived. Harry Edgham had been walking restlessly up and down the parlor, which was a long room.
You know how I feel about you. Why do you refuse?" Maria took another sandwich from her basket. "Thank you for asking us, Mr. Lee," she said, "but we have our luncheon." Her tone was fairly hostile. The hostility was not directed towards him, but towards the weakness in herself. But that he could not understand. "Very well," he said, in a hurt manner. "Of course I will not urge you, Miss Edgham."
When she learned that it was due at an hour so late that it would be impossible for her to go, as she had planned, to Edgham that night, she did not, even then, for the time being, feel in the least dismayed. She had plenty of money. Her last quarter's salary was in her little satchel. The train was made up of Pullmans only, and it was by a good chance that she had secured a seat.
She had wanted a home and a husband; not as some women want them, for the legitimate desire for love and protection, but because she felt a degree of mortification on account of her single estate. She had had many admirers, but, although no one ever knew it, not one offer of marriage, the acceptance of which would not have been an absurdity, before poor Harry Edgham.
People in Edgham aped city society, they even talked about the "four hundred." The newly wedded pair were frequent guests of honor at dinners and receptions, and Ida herself was a member of the Edgham's Woman's Club, and that took her out a good deal. Maria was rather lonely. Finally the added state and luxury of her life, which had at first pleased her, failed to do so.
Harry Edgham came of perhaps the best old family in that vicinity, Edgham itself had been named for it, and while he partook of that degeneracy which comes to the descendants of the large old families, while it is as inevitable that they should run out, so to speak, as flowers which have flourished too many years in a garden, whose soil they have exhausted, he had not lost the habit of rectitude of his ancestors.
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