He and his mother stood together in his little bedroom.  She, when she faced him, saw how ill he looked, but she steeled herself against that.  She had seen him look as badly before; she was not to be daunted by that from her high purpose.  For it was a high purpose to Deborah Thayer.  She did not realize the part which her own human will had in it.

She lifted up her voice and spoke solemnly.  Caleb, listening, all trembling, at the kitchen door, heard her.

“Ephraim,” said his mother, “I have spared the rod with you all my life because you were sick.  Your brother and your sister have both rebelled against the Lord and against me.  You are all the child I’ve got left.  You’ve got to mind me and do right.  I ain’t goin’ to spare you any longer because you ain’t well.  It is better you should be sick than be well and wicked and disobedient.  It is better that your body should suffer than your immortal soul.  Stand still.”

Deborah raised her stick, and brought it down.  She raised it again, but suddenly Ephraim made a strange noise and sunk away before it, down in a heap on the floor.

Caleb heard him fall, and came quickly.

“Oh, mother,” he sobbed, “is he dead?  What ails him?”

“He’s got a bad spell,” said Deborah.  “Help me lay him on the bed.”  Her face was ghastly.  She spoke with hoarse pulls for breath, but she did not flinch.  She and Caleb laid Ephraim on his bed; then she worked over him for a few minutes with mustard and hot-water—­all the simple remedies in which she was skilled.  She tried to pour a little of the doctor’s medicine into his mouth, but he did not swallow, and she wiped it away.

“Go an’ get Barney to run for the doctor, quick!” she told Caleb at last.  Caleb fled, sobbing aloud like a child, out of the house.  Deborah closed the boy’s eyes, and straightened him a little in the bed.  Then she stood over him there, and began to pray aloud.  It was a strange prayer, full of remorse, of awful agony, of self-defense of her own act, and her own position as the vicar of God upon earth for her child.  “I couldn’t let him go astray too!” she shrieked out.  “I couldn’t, I couldn’t!  O Lord, thou knowest that I couldn’t!  I would—­have lain him upon—­the altar, as Abraham laid Isaac!  Oh, Ephraim, my son, my son, my son!”

Deborah prayed on and on.  The doctor and a throng of pale women came in; the yard was full of shocked and staring people.  Deborah heeded nothing; she prayed on.

Some of the women got her into her own room.  She stayed there, with a sort of rigid settling into the spot where she was placed and she pleaded with the Lord for upholding and justification until the daylight faded, and all night.  The women, Mrs. Ray and the doctor’s wife, who watched with poor Ephraim, heard her praying all night long.  They sat in grave silence, and their eyes kept meeting with shocked significance as they listened to her.  Now and then they wet the cloth on Ephraim’s face.  About two o’clock Mrs. Ray tiptoed into the pantry, and brought forth a mince-pie.  “I found one that had been cut on the top shelf,” she whispered.  She and the doctor’s wife ate the remainder of poor Ephraim’s pie.