“Yes, ma’am,” said Ephraim.  He looked away from his mother as he spoke, and his panting breath clouded the clear space on the frosty window-pane.  He sat beside the window in the rocking-chair.

“Mind you tell your father about them apples,” repeated his mother as she went out.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Ephraim.  He watched his mother drive out of the yard, guiding the horse carefully through the frozen ridges of the drive.  Presently he took another spoonful of his medicine.  He felt a little easier, but still very ill.  His father came a few minutes after his mother had gone.  He heard him stamping in through the back door; then his frost-reddened old face looked in on Ephraim.

“Mother gone?” said he.

“She’s jest gone,” replied Ephraim.  His father came in.  He looked at the boy with a childish and anxious sweetness.  “Don’t you feel quite as well as you did?” he inquired.

“Dunno as I do.”

“Took your medicine reg’lar?”

Ephraim nodded.

“I guess it’s good medicine,” said Caleb; “it come real high; I guess the doctor thought consid’ble of it.  I’d take it reg’lar if I was you.  I thought you looked as if you didn’t feel quite so well as common when I come in.”

Caleb took off his boots and tended the fire.  Ephraim began to feel a little better; his heart did not beat quite so laboriously.

He did not say a word to his father about paring the apples.  Caleb went into the pantry and came back eating a slice of mince-pie.

“I found there was a pie cut, and I thought mother wouldn’t mind if I took a leetle piece,” he remarked, apologetically.  He would never have dared take the pie without permission had his wife been at home.  “She ain’t goin’ to be home till arter dinner-time, an’ I began to feel kinder gone,” added Caleb.  He stood by the fire, and munched the pie with a relish slightly lessened by remorse.  “Don’t you want nothin’” he asked of Ephraim.  “Mebbe a little piece of pie wouldn’t hurt you none.”

Caleb’s ideas of hygienic food were primitive.  He believed, as innocently as if he had lived in Eden before the Prohibition, that all food which he liked was good for him, and he applied his theory to all mankind.  He had deferred to Deborah’s imperious will, but he had never been able to understand why she would not allow Ephraim to eat mince-pie or anything else which his soul loved and craved.

“No, guess I don’t,” Ephraim replied.  He gazed moodily out of the window.  “Father,” said he, suddenly.

“What say, sonny?”

“I eat some of that pie last night.”

“Mother give it to you?”

“No; I clim up on the meal-bucket, an’ got it in the night.”

“You might have fell, an’ then I dunno what mother’d ha’ said to you,” said Caleb.

“An’ I did somethin’ else.”

“What else did you do?”

“I went out a-coastin’ after you an’ her was asleep.”