By the Light of the Soul | Page 3

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 had
a beauty of color; now that had passed, and she was sallow, and she
disdained to try to make the most of herself, to soften her stern face by
a judicious arrangement of her still plentiful hair. She strained it back
from her hollow temples, and fastened it securely on the top of her head.
She had a scorn of fashions in hair or dress except for Maria. "Maria is
young," she said, with an ineffable expression of love and pride, and a
tincture of defiance, as if she were defying her own age, in the
ownership of the youth of her child. She was like a rose-bush which
possessed a perfect bud of beauty, and her own long dwelling upon the
earth could on account of that be ignored. But Maria's father was
different. He was quite openly a vain man. He was handsome, and he
held fast to his youth, and would not let it pass by. His hair, curling
slightly over temples boyish in outlines, although marked, was not in
the least gray. His mustache was carefully trimmed. After he had seated
himself unobtrusively in a rear seat, he looked around for his daughter,
who saw him with dismay. "Now," she thought, her chances of
Wollaston Lee walking home with her were lost. Father would go home
with her. Her mother had often admonished Harry Edgham that when
Maria went to meeting alone, he ought to be in waiting to go home with
her, and he obeyed his wife, generally speaking, unless her wishes
conflicted too strenuously with his own. He did not in the least object
to-night, for instance, to dropping late into the prayer-meeting. There
were not many people there, and all the windows were open, and there
was something poetical and sweet about the atmosphere. Besides, the
singing was unusually good for such a place. Above all the other voices
arose Ida Slome's sweet soprano. She sang like a bird; her voice,
although not powerful, was thrillingly sweet. Harry looked at her as she
sang, and thought how pretty she was, but there was no disloyalty to his
wife in the look. He was, in fact, not that sort of man. While he did not
love his Abby with utter passion, all the women of the world could not

have swerved him from her.
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. Virtue
was a hereditary trait of the Edghams.
Harry Edgham looked at Ida Slome with as innocent admiration as
another woman might have done. Then he looked again at his
daughter's little flower-like head, and a feeling of love made his heart
warm. Maria could sing herself, but she was afraid. Once in a while she
droned out a sweet, husky note, then her delicate cheeks flushed
crimson as if all the people had heard her, when they had not heard at
all, and she turned her head, and gazed out of the open window at the
plumed darkness. She thought again with annoyance how she would