“If you talk about it you will make people think so,” said Maria, passionately; “and if they do I will go away from Amity and never come back as long as I live.”

Aunt Maria looked with sharp, gleaming eyes at her niece.  “Maria Edgham, you’ve got something on your mind,” said she.

“I have not.”

“Yes, you have, and I want to know what it is.”

“My mind is my own,” said Maria, indignantly, even cruelly.  Then she rose from the table and ran up-stairs to her own room.

“You have gone off without touching the lemon-cake,” her aunt called after her, but Maria made no response.

Lemon-cake was an outpost which she could not then take.  She had reached her limit, for the time being.  She sat down beside her window in the dark room, lighted only by the gleam from the Merrill house across the yard and an electric light on the street corner.  There were curious lights and shadows over the walls; strange flickerings and wavings as of intangible creatures, unspoken thoughts.  Maria rested her elbows on the window-sill, and rested her chin in her hands, and gazed out.  Presently, with a quiver of despair, she saw the door of the Merrill house open and Lily come flitting across the yard.  She thought, with a shudder, that she was coming to make a few more confidences before George Ramsey arrived.  She heard a timid little knock on the side door, then her aunt’s harsh and uncompromising, “No, Maria ain’t at home,” said she, lying with the utter unrestraint of one who believes in fire and brimstone, and yet lies.  She even repeated it, and emphasized and particularized her lie, seemingly with a grim enjoyment of sin, now that she had taken hold of it.

“Maria went out right after supper,” said she.  Then, evidently in response to Lily’s low inquiry of where she had gone and when she would be home, she said:  “She went to the post-office.  She was expecting a letter from a gentleman in Edgham, I guess, and I shouldn’t wonder if she stopped in at the Monroes’ and played cards.  They’ve been teasing her to.  I shouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t home till ten o’clock.”

Maria heard her aunt with wonder which savored of horror, but she heard the door close and saw Lily flit back across the yard with a feeling of immeasurable relief.  Then she heard her aunt’s voice at her door, opened a narrow crack.

“Are you warm enough in here?” asked Aunt Maria.

“Yes, plenty warm enough.”

“You’d better not light a lamp,” said Aunt Maria, coolly; “I just told that Merrill girl that you had gone out.”

“But I hadn’t,” said Maria.

“I knew it; but there are times when a lie ain’t a lie, it’s only the truth upside-down.  I knew that you didn’t want that doll-faced thing over here again.  She had better stay at home and wait for her new beau.  She was all prinked up fit to kill.  I told her you had gone out, and I meant to, but you’d better not light your lamp for a little while.  It won’t matter after a little while.  I suppose the beau will come, and she won’t pay any attention to it.  But if you light it right away she’ll think you’ve got back and come tearing over here again.”