"You'll laugh at me." "No, I won't, honest, precious." "Honest?" "Yes, honest, dear." "Were those all the presents I had?" "Yes, of course, I brought you all you had, dear." Evelyn murmured something inarticulate against Maria's breast. "What is it, dear, sister didn't hear?" "I hung a book on the tree for him," choked Evelyn, "and I thought maybe--I thought--" "Thought what?" "I thought maybe he would--" "Who would?" "I thought maybe Mr. Lee would give me something," sobbed Evelyn. Maria lay still. Evelyn nestled closer. "Oh," she whispered, "I love him so! I can't help it. I can't. I love him so, sister!" Chapter XXXIII There was a second's hush after Evelyn had said that. It seemed to Maria that her heart stood still. A sort of incredulity, as of the monstrous and the super-human seized her. She felt as one who had survived a railroad accident might feel looking down upon his own dismembered body in which life still quivered. She could not seem to actually sense what Evelyn had said, although the words still rang in her ears. Presently, Evelyn spoke again in her smothered, weeping voice. "Do you think I am so very dreadful, so--immodest, to care so much about a man who has never said he cared about me?" "He has never said anything?" asked Maria, and her voice sounded strange in her own ears. "No, never one word that I could make anything of, but he has looked at me, he has, honest, sister." Evelyn burst into fresh sobs. Then Maria roused herself. She patted the little, soft, dark head. "Why, Evelyn, precious," she said, "you are imagining all this. You can't care so much about a man whom you have seen so little. You have let your mind dwell on it, and you imagine it. You don't care. You can't, really. You wait, and by-and-by you will find out that you care a good deal more for somebody else." But then Evelyn raised herself and looked down at her sister in the dark, and there was a ring in her voice which Maria had never before heard. "Not care," she said--"not care! I will stand everything but that. Maria, don't you dare tell me I don't care!" "But you don't know him at all, dear." "I know him better than anybody else in the whole world," said Evelyn, still in the same strained voice. "The very minute I saw him I loved him, and then it seemed as if a great bright light made him plain to me. I do love him, Maria. Don't you ever dare say I don't. That is the only thing that makes me feel that I am not ashamed to live, the knowing that I do love him. I should be dreadful if I didn't love him--really love him, I mean, with the love that lasts. Do you suppose that if I only felt about him as some of the other girls do, that I would have told you? I _do_ love him!" "What makes you so sure?"