"We'll go right in," he said, in a stern, peremptory tone; then he turned to William. "Are you ready?" he asked.

William nodded, with his eyes cast down. The party made a motion towards the other room, but Mrs. Sloane unexpectedly stood before the door.

"I told her there shouldn't nobody come in," said she, "an' I ain't goin' to have you all bustin' in on her without she knows it. She's terrible upset. You wait a minute."

Mrs. Sloane's blue eyes glared defiantly at the company. The minister's wife bent her hooded head lower. She had heard about Mrs.

Sloane, and felt as if she were confronted by a woman from Revelation and there was a flash of scarlet in the room.

"Go in and tell her we are coming," said Barney. And Mrs. Sloane slipped out of the room cautiously, opening the door only a little way. Her voice was heard, and suddenly Rebecca's rang out shrill in response, although they could not distinguish the words. Mrs. Sloane looked out. "She says she won't be married," she whispered.

"You let me see her," said Barney, and he took a stride forward, but Mrs. Sloane held the door against him.

"You can't," she whispered again. "I'll talk to her some more. I can talk her over, if anybody can."

Barney fell back, and again the door was shut and the voices were heard. This time Rebecca's arose into a wail, and they heard her cry out, "I won't, I won't! Go away, and stop talking to me! I won't! Go away!"

William turned around, and hid his face against the corner of the mantel-shelf. Barney went up and clapped him roughly on the shoulder.

"Can't you go in there and make her listen to reason?" he said.

But just then Mrs. Sloane opened the door again. "You can walk right in now," she announced, smiling, her thin mouth sending the lines of her whole face into smirking upward curves.

The whole company edged forward solemnly. Mrs. Sloane was following, but Barney stood in her way. "I guess you'd better not come in," he said, abruptly.

Mrs. Sloane's face flushed a burning red. "I guess," she began, in a loud voice, but Barney shut the door in her face. She ran noisily, stamping her feet like an angry child, to the fireplace, caught up a heavy kettle, and threw it down on the hearth. The hens flew up with a great clamor and whir of wings; Mrs. Sloane's shrill, mocking laugh arose above it. She began talking in a high-pitched voice, flinging out vituperations which would seem to patter against the closed door like bullets. Suddenly she stopped, as if her ire had failed her, and listened intently to a low murmur from the other room. She nodded her head when it ceased.

The door opened soon, and all except Rebecca came out. They stood consulting together in low voices, and Mrs. Sloane listened. They were deciding where to take Rebecca.

All at once Mrs. Sloane spoke. Her voice was still high-pitched with anger.

"If you want to know where to take her to, I can tell you," said she.

"I'd keep her here an' welcome, but I s'pose you think I ain't good enough, you're all such mighty particular folks, an' ain't never had no disgrace in your own families. William Berry can't take her to his home to-night, for his mother wouldn't leave a whole skin on either of 'em. Her own mother has turned her out, an' Barney can't take her in. She's got to go somewhere where there's a woman; she's terrible upset. There ain't no other way but for you an' Mis' Barnes to take her home to-night, an' keep her till William gets a place fixed to put her in." Mrs. Sloane turned to the minister and his wife, regarding them with a mixture of defiance, sarcasm, and appeal.

They looked at each other hesitatingly. The minister's wife paled within her hood, and her eyes reddened with tears.

"I shouldn't s'pose you'd need any time to think on it, such good folks as you be," said Mrs. Sloane. "There ain't no other way. She's got to be where there's a woman."

Mrs. Barnes turned her head towards her husband. "She can come, if you think she ought to," she said, in a trembling voice.

The sun was setting when the party started. William led Rebecca out through the kitchen--a muffled, hesitating figure, whose very identity seemed to be lost, for she wore Mrs. Sloane's blue plaid shawl pinned closely over her head and face--and lifted her into his cutter with the minister and his wife. Then he and Barney walked along, plodding through the deep snow behind the cutter. The sun was setting, and it was bitterly cold; the snow creaked and the trees swung with a stiff rattle of bare limbs in the wind.

The two men never spoke to each other. The minister drove slowly, and they could always see Mrs. Jim Sloane's blue plaid shawl ahead.

When they reached the Caleb Thayer house, Barney stopped and William followed on alone after the sleigh.

Barney turned into the yard, and his father was standing in the barn door, looking out.

"Tell mother she's married," Barney sang out, hoarsely. Then he went back to the road, and home to his own house.

Chapter XI

Barney went to see Rebecca the next day, but the minister's wife came to the door and would not admit him. She puckered her lips painfully, and a blush shot over her face and little thin throat as she stood there before him. "I guess you had better not come in," said she, nervously. "I guess you had better wait until Mrs. Berry gets settled in her house. Mr. Berry is going to hire the old Bennett place. I guess it would be pleasanter."

Barney turned away, blushing also as he stammered an assent. Always keenly alive to the shame of the matter, it seemed as if his sense of it were for the moment intensified. The minister's wife's whole nature seemed turned into a broadside of mirrors towards Rebecca's shame and misery, and it was as if the reflection was multiplied in Barney as he looked at her.

Still, he could not take the shame to his own nature as she could, being a woman. He looked back furtively at the house as he went down the road, thinking he might catch a glimpse of poor Rebecca at the window.

But Rebecca kept herself well hid. After William had hired the old Bennet house and established her there, she lived with curtains down and doors bolted. Never a neighbor saw her face at door or window, although all the women who lived near did their housework with eyes that way. She would not go to the door if anybody knocked. The caller would hear her scurrying away. Nobody could gain admittance if William were not at home.

Barney went to the door once, and her voice sounded unexpectedly loud and piteously shrill in response to his knock.

"You can't come in! go away!" cried Rebecca.

"I don't want to say anything hard to you," said Barney.

"Go away, go away!" repeated Rebecca, and then he heard her sob.

"Don't cry," pleaded Barney, futilely, through the door. But he heard his sister's retreating steps and her sobs dying away in the distance.

He went away, and did not try to see her again.

Rose went to see Rebecca, stealing out of a back door and scudding across snowy fields lest her mother should espy her and stop her. But Rebecca had not come to the door, although Rose had stood there a long time in a bitter wind.

"She wouldn't let me in," she whispered to her brother in the store, when she returned. She was friendly to him in a shamefaced, evasive sort of way, and she alone of his family. His father and mother scarcely noticed him.

"Much as ever as she'll let me in, poor girl," responded William, looking miserably aside from his sister's eyes and weighing out some meal.

"She wouldn't let mother in if she went there," said Rose. She felt a little piqued at Rebecca's refusing her admittance. It was as if all her pity and generous sympathy had been thrust back upon her, and her pride in it swamped.

"There's no danger of her going there," William returned, bitterly.

And there was not. Hannah Berry would have set herself up in a pillory as soon as she would have visited her son's wife. She scarcely went into a neighbor's lest she should hear some allusion to it.

Rebecca's father often walked past her house with furtive, wistful eyes towards the windows. Once or twice when nobody was looking he knocked timidly, but he never got any response. He always took a circuitous route home, that his wife might not know where he had been. Deborah never spoke of Rebecca; neither Caleb nor Ephraim dared mention her name in her hearing.

Although Deborah never asked a question, and although people were shy of alluding to Rebecca, she yet seemed to know, in some occult and instinctive fashion, all about her.

When a funeral procession passed the Thayer house one afternoon Deborah knew quite well whose little coffin was in the hearse, although she could scarcely have said that anybody had told her.

Caleb came to her after dinner, with a strange, defiant air. "I want a clean dicky, mother; I'm agoin'," said he. And Deborah got out the old man's Sunday clothes for him without a word. She even brushed his hair with hard, careful strokes, and helped him on with his great-coat; but she never said a word about Rebecca and her baby's funeral.

"They had some white posies on it," Caleb volunteered, tremblingly, when he got home.

Deborah made no reply.

"There was quite a lot there," added Caleb.