He picked a piece of grass, as he waited, and began chewing it.
"How do you know that isn't poison ?" said Maria, breathlessly.
"Don't care if it is; hope it is," said the boy.
"It's wicked to talk so." "Let it be wicked then." "I don't see how I am to blame for any of it," Maria said, in a bewildered sort of way.

It was the cry of the woman, the primitive cry of the primitive scape-goat of Creation.

Already Maria began to feel the necessity of fitting her little shoulders to the blame of life, which she had inherited from her Mother Eve, but she was as yet bewildered by the necessity.
"Ain't it your father that's going to marry her ?" inquired Wollaston, fiercely.
"I don't want him to marry her any more than you do," said Maria.

"I don't want her for a mother." "I told you how it would come out, if I asked her," cried the boy, still heaping the blame upon the girl.
"I would enough sight rather marry you than my father, if I were the teacher," said Maria, and her blue eyes looked into Wollaston's with the boldness of absolute guilelessness.
"Hush!" responded Wollaston, with a gesture of disdain.

"Who'd want you?
You're nothing but a girl, anyway." With that scant courtesy Wollaston Lee resumed his race homeward, and Maria went her own way.
It was that very night, after Harry Edgham had returned from his call upon Ida Slome, that he told Maria.