Her mother, darning stockings by the window, suddenly laid down her work and said:  “Sylvia, how would you like to walk with me over to the Martins’ to see if they have any eggs?  Our hens have absolutely gone back on us.”

Sylvia did not welcome this idea at all, feeling as overwhelming an aversion to companionship as to solitude, but she could think of no excuse, and in an ungracious silence put on her wraps and joined her mother, ready on the porch, the basket in her mittened hand.

Mrs. Marshall’s pace was always swift, and on that crisp, cold, sunny day, with the wind sweeping free over the great open spaces of the plain about them, she walked even more rapidly than usual.  Not a word was spoken.  Sylvia, quite as tall as her mother now, and as vigorous, stepped beside her, not noticing their pace, nor the tingling of the swift blood in her feet and hands.  Her fresh young face was set in desolate bitterness.

The Martins’ house was about six miles from the Marshalls’.  It was reached, the eggs procured, and the return begun.  Still not a word had been exchanged between the two women.  Mrs. Marshall would have been easily capable, under the most ordinary circumstances, of this long self-contained silence, but it had worked upon Sylvia like a sojourn in the dim recesses of a church.  She felt moved, stirred, shaken.  But it was not until the brief winter sun was beginning to set red across the open reaches of field and meadow that her poisoned heart overflowed.  “Oh, Mother—!” she exclaimed in an unhappy tone, and said no more.  She knew no words to phrase what was in her mind.

“Yes, dear,” said her mother gently.  She looked at her daughter anxiously, expectantly, with a passion of yearning in her eyes, but she said no more than those two words.

There was a silence.  Sylvia was struggling for expression.  They continued to walk swiftly through the cold, ruddy, sunset air, the hard-frozen road ringing beneath their rapid advance.  Sylvia clasped her hands together hard in her muff.  She felt that something in her heart was dying, was suffocating for lack of air, and yet that it would die if she brought it to light.  She could find no words at all to ask for help, agonizing in a shy reticence impossible for an adult to conceive.  Finally, beginning at random, very hurriedly, looking away, she brought out, faltering, “Mother, is it true that all men are—­that when a girl marries she must expect to—­aren’t there any men who—­” She stopped, burying her burning face in her muff.

Her words, her tone, the quaver of desperate sincerity in her accent, brought her mother up short.  She stopped abruptly and faced the girl.  “Sylvia, look at me!” she said in a commanding voice which rang loud in the frosty silences about them.  Sylvia started and looked into her mother’s face.  It was moved so darkly and so deeply from its usual serene composure that she would have recoiled in fear, had she not been seized upon and held motionless by the other’s compelling eyes.