"We'll go up the turnpike, then," said Barney. William nodded. The two men sprang into the cutter, and the snow flew in their faces from the horse's hoofs as they went out the barn door.

The old tavern stood facing the old turnpike road to Boston, but the store and barn faced on the new road at its back, and people generally approached the tavern by that way.

William and Barney had to drive down the hill; then turn the corner, and up the hill again on the old turnpike.

There was not a house on that road for a full mile. William urged the horse as fast as he could through the fresh snow. Both men kept a sharp lookout at the sides of the road. The sun was out now, and the snow was blinding white; the north wind drove a glittering spray as sharp and stinging as diamond-dust in their faces.

Once William cried out, with a dry sob, "My God, she'll freeze in this wind, if she's out in it!"

And Barney answered, "Maybe it would be better for her if she did."

William looked at him for the first time since they started. "See here, Barney," he said, "God knows it's not to shield myself--I'm past that; but I've begged her all summer to be married. I've been down on my knees to her to be married before it came to this."

"Why wouldn't she?"

"I don't know, oh, I don't know! The poor girl was near distracted.

Her mother forbade her to marry me, and held up her Aunt Rebecca, who married against her parents' wishes and hung herself, before her, all the time. Your trouble with Charlotte Barnard brought it all about.

Her mother never opposed it before. I begged her to marry me, but she was afraid, or something, I don't know what."

"Can't you drive faster?" said Barney.

William had been urging the horse while he spoke, but now he shook the whip over him again.

Mrs. Jim Sloane's house was a long, unpainted cottage quite near the road. The woman who lived alone there was under a kind of indefinite ban in the village. Her husband, who had died several years before, had been disreputable and drunken, and the mantle of his disgrace had seemed to fall upon his wife, if indeed she was not already provided with such a mantle of her own. Everybody spoke slightingly of Mrs.

Jim Sloane. The men laughed meaningly when they saw her pass, wrapped in an old plaid shawl, which she wore summer and winter, and which seemed almost like a uniform. Stories were told of her dirt and shiftlessness, of the hens which roosted in her kitchen. Poor Mrs.

Jim Sloane, in her blue plaid shawl, tramping frequently from her solitary house through the village, was a byword and a mocking to all the people.

When William and Barney came abreast of her house they saw the blue flutter of Mrs. Jim Sloane's shawl out before, above the blue dazzle of the snow.

"Hullo!" she was crying out in her shrill voice, and waving her hand to them to stop.

William pulled the horse up short, and the woman came plunging through the snow close to his side.

"She's in here," she said, with a knowing smile. The faded fair hair blew over her eyes; she pushed it back with a coquettish gesture; there was a battered prettiness about her thin pink-and-white face, turning blue in the sharp wind.

"When did she get here?" asked Barney.

"This forenoon. She fell down out here, couldn't get no farther. I came out an' got her into the house. Didn't know but she was done to; but I fixed her up some hot drink an' made her lay down. I s'posed you'd be along." She smiled again.

William jumped out of the cutter, and tied the horse to an old fence-post. Then he and Barney followed the woman into the house.

Barney looked at the old blue plaid shawl with utter disgust and revulsion. He had always felt a loathing for the woman, and her being a distant relative on his father's side intensified it.

Mrs. Sloane threw open the door, and bade them enter, as if to a festival. "Walk right in," said she.

There was a wild flutter of hens as they entered. Mrs. Sloane drove them before her. "The hen-house roof fell in, an' I have to keep 'em in here," she said, and shooed them and shook her shawl at them, until they alighted all croaking with terror upon the bed in the corner.

Then she looked inquiringly around the room. "Why," she cried, "she's gone; she was settin' here in this rockin'-chair when I went out. She must have run when she see you comin'!"

Mrs. Sloane hustled through a door, the tattered fringes of her shawl flying, and then her voice, shrilly expostulating, was heard in the next room.

The two men waited, standing side by side near the door in a shamed silence. They did not look at each other.

Presently Mrs. Sloane returned without her shawl. Her old cotton gown showed tattered and patched, and there were glimpses of her sharp white elbows at the sleeves. "She won't come out a step," she announced. "I can't make her. She's takin' on terribly."

William made a stride forward. "I'll go in and see her," he said, hoarsely; but Mrs. Jim Sloane stood suddenly in his way, her slender back against the door.

"No, you ain't goin' in," said she, "I told her I wouldn't let you go in."

William looked at her.

"She's dreadful set against either one of you comin' in, an' I told her you shouldn't," she said, firmly. She smoothed her wild locks down tightly over her ears as she spoke. All the coquettish look was gone.

William turned around, and looked helplessly at Barney, and Barney looked back at him. Then Barney put on his hat, and shrugged himself more closely into his great-coat.

"I'll go and get the minister," he said.

Mrs. Sloane thrust her chin out alertly. "Goin' to get her married right off?" she asked, with a confidential smile.

Barney ignored her. "I guess it's the best way to do," he said, sternly, to William; and William nodded.

"Well, I guess 'tis the best way," Mrs. Sloane said, with cheerful assent. "I don't b'lieve you could hire her to come out of that room an' go to the minister's, nohow. She's terrible upset, poor thing."

As Barney went out of the door he cast a look full of involuntary suspicion back at William, and hesitated a second on the threshold.

Mrs. Sloane intercepted the look. "I'll look out he don't run away while you're gone," she said; then she laughed.

William's white face flamed up suddenly, but he made no reply. When Barney had gone he drew a chair up close to the hearth, and sat there, bent over, with his elbows on his knees. Mrs. Sloane sat down on the foot of the bed, close to the door of the other room, as if she were mounting guard over it. She kept looking at William, and smiling, and opening her mouth to speak, then checking herself.

"It's a pretty cold day," she said, finally.

William grunted assent without looking up. Then he motioned with his shoulder towards the door of the other room. "Ain't it cold in there?" he half whispered.

"I rolled her all up in my shawl; I guess she won't ketch cold; it's thick," responded the woman, effusively, and William said no more. He sat with his chin in his hands and his eyes fixed absently. The fire was smoking over a low, red glow of coals, the chimney-place yawned black before him, the hearth was all strewn with pots and kettles, and the shelf above it was piled high with a vague household litter.

It had leaked around the chimney, and there was a great discolored blotch on the wall above the shelf, and the ceiling. Two or three hens came pecking around the kettles at William's feet.

To this young man, brought up in the extreme thrift and neatness of a typical New England household, this strange untidiness, as he viewed it through his strained mental state, seemed to have a deeper significance, and reveal the very shame and squalor of the soul itself, and its own existence and thoughts, by material images.

He might from his own sensations, as he sat there, have been actually translated into a veritable hell, from the utter strangeness of the atmosphere which his thoughts seemed to gasp in. William had never come fully into the atmosphere of his own sin before, but now he had, and somehow the untidy pots and kettles on the hearth made it more real. He was conscious as he sat there of very little pity for the girl in the other room, of very little love for her, and also of very little love or pity for himself; he felt nothing but a kind of horror. He saw suddenly the alien side of life, and the alien side of his own self, which he would always have kept faced out towards space, away from all eyes, like the other side of the moon, and that was for the time all he could grasp.

Once or twice Mrs. Sloane volunteered a remark, but he scarcely responded, and once he heard absently her voice and Rebecca's in the other room. Otherwise he sat in utter silence, except for the low chuckle of the hens and the taps of their beaks against the iron pots, until Barney came with the minister and the minister's wife.

Barney had taken the minister aside, and asked him, stammeringly, if he thought his wife would come. He could not bear the thought of the Sloane woman's being a witness at his sister's wedding. The minister and his wife were both very young, and had not lived long in Pembroke. They looked much alike: the minister's small, pale, peaked face peered with anxious solicitude between the folds of the great green scarf which he tied over his cap, and his wife looked like him out of her great wadded green silk hood, when they got into the sleigh with Barney.

The minister had had a whispered conference with his wife, and now she never once let her eyes rest on either of the two men as they slid swiftly along over the new snow. Her heart beat loudly in her ears, her little thin hands were cold in her great muff. She had married very young, out of a godly New England minister's home. She had never known anything like this before, and a sort of general shame of femininity seemed to be upon her.

When she followed her husband into Mrs. Sloane's house she felt herself as burdened with shame--as if she stood in Rebecca's place.

Her little face, all blue with the sharp cold, shrank, shocked and sober, into the depths of her great hood. She stood behind her husband, her narrow girlish shoulders bending under her thick mantilla, and never looked at the face of anybody in the room.

She did not see William at all. He stood up before them as they entered; they all nodded gravely. Nobody spoke but Mrs. Sloane, vibrating nervously in the midst of her clamorous hens, and Barney silenced her.