Maria was secretly glad, and proud of it.

It meant much to her that _her_ baby should not smile at all the company, whether it was smiling in its heart or not, the way She did.

Maria had no room in her heart for any other love, except that for her father and the baby.

She looked at Wollaston Lee, and wondered how she could ever have had dreams about him, how she could ever have preferred a boy to a baby like her little sister, even in her dreams.

She ceased haunting the post-office for a letter from that other boy in New England, who had asked her to correspond over the garden fence, and who had either never written at all, or had misdirected his letter.
She wondered how she had thought for a moment of doing such a thing as writing to a boy like that.