The next autumn, Maria began attending the Elliot Academy, in Wardway.  The Elliot Academy was an endowed school of a very high standing, and Wardway was a large town, almost a city, about fifteen miles from Edgham.  When this plan was broached by Ida, Maria did not make any opposition; she was secretly delighted.  Wollaston Lee was going to the Elliot Academy that autumn, and there was another Edgham girl and her brother, besides Maria, who were going.

“Now, darling, you need not go to the Elliot Academy any more than to the other school she proposed, if you don’t want to,” Harry told Maria, privately, one Saturday afternoon in September, shortly before the term began.

Ida had gone to her club, and Harry had come home early from the city, and he and Maria were alone in the parlor.  Evelyn was having her nap up-stairs.  A high wind was roaring about the house.  A cherry-tree beside the house was fast losing its leaves in a yellow rain.  In front of the window, a hydrangea bush, tipped with magnificent green-and-rosy plumes, swayed in all its limbs like a living thing.  Somewhere up-stairs a blind banged.

“I think I would like to go,” Maria replied, hurriedly.  Then she jumped up.  “That blind will wake Evelyn,” she said, and ran out of the room.

She had colored unaccountably when her father spoke.  When she returned, she had a demure, secretive expression on her face which made Harry stare at her in bewilderment.  All his life Harry Edgham had been helpless and bewildered before womenkind, and now his little daughter was beginning to perplex him.  She sat down and took up a piece of fancy-work, and her father continued to glance at her furtively over his paper.  Presently he spoke of the academy again.

“You need not go if you do not want to,” he repeated.

Then again Maria’s delicate little face and neck became suffused with pink.  Her reply was not as loud nor more intelligible than the murmur of the trees outside in the wind.

“What did you say, darling?” asked Harry.  “Father did not understand.”

“I would like to go there,” Maria replied, in her sweet, decisive little pipe.  A fresh wave of color swept over her face and neck, and she selected with great care a thread from a skein of linen floss.

“Well, she thought you might like that,” Harry said, with an air of relief.

“Maud Page is going, too,” said Maria.

“Is she?  That will be nice.  You won’t have to go back and forth alone,” said Harry.

Maria said nothing; she continued her work.

Her father turned his paper and looked at the stock-list.  Once he had owned a hundred shares of one of the Industrials.  He had long since sold out, not at a loss, but the stock had risen since.  He always noted it with an odd feeling of proprietorship, in spite of not owning any.  He saw with pride that it had advanced half a point.