The Wind in the Rose-Bush by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
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An unmarried schoolteacher crosses a river by ferry to collect her dead sister's daughter from the girl's stepmother, a woman with china-blue eyes and a smile that is hiding something.

Nobody in Ford Village will say anything. And then there's the rose-bush that flutters when there is no wind.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, better known for her hard-eyed portraits of small-town New England households, turns that same unsparing eye on a relationship that prizes respectability over truth. What starts as an ordinary of family obligation becomes something closer to a tragedy, and we never see it coming.