She was blushing and smiling with pleasure.
Mrs.White sighed.

"Well, maybe it is for the best," said she.

"One never knows about such things, how they will work out." Maria listened, with a degree of indignation and awe, to the service.
She felt her heart swelling with grief at the sight of this other woman being made her father's wife and put in the place of her own mother, and yet, as a musical refrain is the haunting and ever-recurrent part of a composition, so was her own charming appearance.

She felt so sure that people were observing her, that she blushed and dared not look around.

She was, in reality, much observed, and both admired and pitied.
People, both privately and outspokenly, did not believe that the step-mother would be, in a way, good to the child by the former marriage.