"Well, mebbe we'll come over to-morrow," said Hannah. "We've got some pillow-slips to trim, an' we can bring them. You'd better ask Sarah an' Charlotte, if she can stay away from Rebecca Thayer's long enough."

"Yes, I will," said Sylvia, feebly, over her shoulder.

"We'll come early," said Hannah. Then the sisters sped apart through the early winter darkness. Poor Sylvia fairly groaned out loud when her sister was out of hearing and she had turned the corner of the old road.

"What shall I do? what shall I do?" she muttered.

Her sisters to tea meant hot biscuits and plum sauce and pie and pound-cake and tea. Sylvia had yet a little damson sauce at the bottom of a jar, although she had not preserved last year, for lack of sugar; but hot biscuits and pie, the pound-cake and tea would have to be provided.

She felt again of the little money-store in her pocket; that was all that stood between her and the poor-house; every penny was a barrier and had its carefully calculated value. This outlay would reduce terribly her little period of respite and independence; yet she hesitated as little as Fouquet planning the splendid entertainment, which would ruin him, for Louis XIII.

Her sisters and nieces must come to tea; and all the food, which was the village fashion and as absolute in its way as court etiquette, must be provided.

"They'll suspect if I don't," said Sylvia Crane.

She rolled away the stone from the door and entered her solitary house. She lighted her candle and prepared for bed. She did not get any supper. She said to herself with a sudden fierceness, which came over her at times--a mild impulse of rebellion which indicated perhaps some strain from far-off, untempered ancestors, which had survived New England generations--that she did not care if she never ate supper again.

"They're all comin' troopin' in here to-morrow, an' it's goin' to take about all the little I've got left to get victuals for 'em, an'

I've got to go without to-night if I starve!" she cried out quite loud and defiantly, as if her hard providence lurked within hearing in some dark recess of the room.

She raked ashes over the coals in the fireplace. "I'll go to bed an'

save the fire, too," she said; "it'll take about all the wood I've got left to-morrow. I've got to heat the oven. Might as well go to bed, an' lay there forever, anyway. If I stayed up till doomsday nobody'd come."

Sylvia set the shovel back with a vicious clatter; then she struck out--like a wilful child who hurts itself because of its rage and impotent helplessness to hurt aught else--her thin, red hand against the bricks of the chimney. She looked at the bruises on it with bitter exultation, as if she saw in them some evidence of her own freedom and power, even to her own hurt.

When she went to bed she stowed away her money under the feather-bed.

She could not go to sleep. Some time in the night a shutter in another room up-stairs banged. She got up, lighted the candle, and trod over the icy floors to the room relentlessly with her bare feet.

There was a pane of glass broken behind the shutter, and the wind had loosened the fastening. Sylvia forced the shutter back; in a strange rage she heard another pane of glass crack. "I don't care if every pane of glass in the window is broken," she muttered, as she hooked the fastening with angry, trembling fingers.

Her thin body in its cotton night-gown, cramped with long rigors of cold, her delicate face reddened as if before a fire, her jaws felt almost locked as she went through the deadly cold of the lonely house back to bed; but that strange rage in her heart enabled her to defy it, and awakened within her something like blasphemy against life and all the conditions thereof, but never against Richard Alger. She never felt one throb of resentment against him. She even wondered, when she was back in bed, if he had bedclothing enough, if the quilts and bed-puffs that his mother had left were not worn out; her own were very thin.

The next day Sylvia heated her brick oven; she went to the store and bought materials, and made pound-cake and pies. While they were baking she ran over and invited Charlotte and her mother. She did not see Cephas; he had gone to draw some wood.

"I'd like to have him come, too," she said, as she went out; "but I dunno as he'd eat anything I've got for tea."

"Land! he eats anything when he goes out anywhere to tea," replied Mrs. Barnard. "He was over to Hannah's a while ago, an' he eat everything. He eats pie-crust with shortenin' now, anyway. He got so he couldn't stan' it without. I guess he'd like to come. He'll have to draw wood some this afternoon, but he can come in time for tea.

I'll lay out his clothes on the bed for him."

"Well, have him come, then," said Sylvia. Sylvia was nearly out of the yard when Charlotte called after her: "Don't you want me to come over and help you, Aunt Sylvia?" she called out. She stood in the door with her apron flying out in the wind like a blue flag.

"No, I guess not," replied Sylvia; "I don't need any help. I ain't got much to do."

"I think Aunt Sylvia looks sick," Charlotte said to her mother when she went in.

"I thought she looked kind of peaked," said Sarah. But neither of them dreamed of the true state of affairs: how poor Sylvia Crane, half-starved and half-frozen in heart and stomach, was on the verge of bankruptcy of all her little worldly possessions.

Sylvia's sisters, practical enough in other respects, were singularly ignorant and incompetent concerning any property except the few dollars and cents in their own purses.

They had always supposed Sylvia had enough to live on, as long as she lived at all. They had a comfortable sense of generosity and self-sacrifice, since they had let her have all the old homestead after her mother's death without a word, and even against covert remonstrances on the parts of their husbands.

Silas Berry had once said out quite openly to his wife and Sarah Barnard: "That will had ought to be broke, accordin' to my way of thinkin'," and Hannah had returned with spirit: "It won't ever be broke unless it's against my will, Silas Berry. I know it seems considerable for Sylvy to have it all, but she's took care of mother all those years, an' I don't begrutch it to her, an' she's a-goin' to have it. I don't much believe Richard Alger will ever have her now she's got so old, an' she'd ought to have enough to live on the rest of her life an' keep her comfortable."

Therefore Sylvia's sisters had a conviction that she was comfortably provided with worldly gear. Mrs. Berry was even speculating upon the probability of her giving Rose something wherewith to begin house-keeping when her marriage with Tommy Ray took place.

The two sisters, with their daughters, came early that afternoon.

Mrs. Berry and Rose sewed knitted lace on pillow-slips; Mrs. Barnard and Charlotte were making new shirts for Cephas; Charlotte sat by the window and set beautiful stitches in her father's linen shirt-bosoms, while her aunt Hannah's tongue pricked her ceaselessly as with small goading thorns.

"I s'pose this seems kind of natural to you, don't it, Charlotte, gettin' pillow-slips ready?" said Mrs. Berry.

"I don't know but it does," answered Charlotte, never raising her eyes from her work. Her mother flushed angrily. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then she shut it again hard.

"Let me see, how many did you make?" asked Mrs. Berry.

"She made two dozen pair," Charlotte's mother answered for her.

"An' you've got 'em all laid away, yellowin'?"

"I guess they ain't yellowed much," said Sarah Barnard.

"I don't see when you're ever goin' to use 'em."

"Mebbe there'd be chances enough to use 'em if some folks was as crazy to take up with 'em as some other folks," returned Sarah Barnard.

"I'd like to know what you mean?"

"Oh, nothin'. If folks want chances to make pillow-slips bad enough there's generally poor tools enough layin' 'round, that's all."

"I'd like to know what you mean, Sarah Barnard."

"Oh, I don't mean nothin'," answered Sarah Barnard. She glanced at her daughter Charlotte and smiled slyly, but Charlotte never returned the glance and smile. She sewed steadily. Rose colored, but she said nothing. She looked very pretty and happy, as she sat there, sewing knitted lace on her wedding-pillows; and she really was happy. Her passionate heart had really satisfied itself with the boyish lover whom she would have despised except for lack of a better. She was and would be happy enough; it was only a question of deterioration of character, and the nobility of applying to the need of love the rules of ordinary hunger and thirst, and eating contentedly the crust when one could not get the pie, of drinking the water when one could not get the wine. Contentment may be sometimes a degradation; but she was happier than she had ever been in her life, although she had a little sense of humiliation when she reflected that Tommy Ray, younger than herself, tending store under her brother, was not exactly a brilliant match for her, and that everybody in the village would think so. So she colored angrily when her aunt Sarah spoke as she did, although she said nothing. But her mother, although she had rebelled in private bitterly against her daughter's choice, was ready enough to take up the cudgels for her in public.

"Well," said Hannah Berry, "two old maids in the family is about enough, accordin' to my way of thinkin'."

"It's better to be an old maid than to marry somebody you don't want, jest for the sake of bein' married," retorted Sarah Barnard, fiercely.

The two sisters clashed like two thorny bushes of one family in a gale the whole afternoon. The two daughters sewed silently, and Sylvia knitted a stocking with scarcely a word until she arose to get tea.

Cephas and Silas both came to tea, which was served in state, with a fine linen table-cloth, and Sylvia's mother's green and white sprigged china. Nobody suspected, as they tasted the damson sauce with the thin silver spoons, as they tilted the green and white teacups to their lips, and ate the rich pound-cake and pie, what a very feast of renunciation and tragedy this was to poor Sylvia Crane.

Cephas and Silas, indeed, knew that money had been advanced her by the town upon her estate, but they were far from suspecting, and, indeed, were unwilling to suspect, how nearly it was exhausted and the property lived out. It was only a meagre estimate that the town of Pembroke had made of the Crane ancestral acres. If Silas and Cephas had ever known what it was, they had dismissed it from their minds, they were interested in not knowing. Suppose their wives should want to give her a home and support.

The women knew nothing whatever.

When they went home, an hour after tea, Hannah Berry turned to Sylvia in the doorway. "I suppose you know the weddin' is comin' off pretty soon now," said she.

"Yes, I s'posed 'twas," answered Sylvia, trying to smile.

"Well, I thought I'd jest mention it, so you could get your present ready," said Hannah. She nudged Rose violently as she spoke.

"I don't care; I meant to give her a hint," she said, chuckling, when they were outside. "She can give you something jest as well as not; she might give you some silver teaspoons, or a table, or sofa. There!