Barney, after his father died, went back to his own forlorn new house to live, and his sister Rebecca and her husband came to live in the old one.  Rebecca went to meeting now every Sunday, wearing her mother’s black shawl and a black ribbon on her bonnet, and sitting in her mother’s place in the Thayer pew.  She never went anywhere else, her rosy color had gone, and she looked old and haggard.

Barney went into his sister’s now and then of a Sunday night, and sat with her and William an hour or so.  He and William would sometimes warm into quite an animated discussion over politics or theology, while Rebecca sat silently by.  Barney went nowhere else, not even to meeting.  Sundays he used to watch furtively for Charlotte to go past with her father and mother.  Quite often Sylvia Crane used to appear from her road and join them, and walk along with Charlotte.  Barney used to look at her moving down the road at Charlotte’s side, as at the merest supernumerary on his own tragic stage.  But every tragedy has its multiplying glass to infinity, and every actor has his own tragedy.  Sylvia Crane that winter, all secretly and silently, was acting her own principal role in hers.  She had quite come to the end of her small resources, and nobody, except the selectmen of Pembroke, knew it.  They were three saturnine, phlegmatic, elderly men, old Squire Payne being the chairman, and they kept her secret well.  Sylvia waylaid them in by-places, she stole around to the back door of Squire Payne’s house by night, she conducted herself as if it were a guilty intrigue, and all to keep her poverty hid as long as may be.

Old Squire Payne was a widower, a grave old man of few words.  He advanced poor Sylvia meagre moneys on her little lands, and he told nobody.  There came a day when he gave her the last dollar upon her New England soil, full of old plough-ridges and dried weeds and stones.

Sylvia went home with it in the pocket of her quilted petticoat under her dress skirt.  She kept feeling of it to see if it were safe as she walked along.  The snow was quite deep, the road was not well broken out, and she plodded forward with bent head, her black skirt gathering a crusty border of snow.

She had to pass Richard Alger’s house, but she never looked up.  It was six o’clock, and quite dark; it had been dark when she set out at five.  The housewives were preparing supper; there was a smell of burning pine-wood in the air, and now and then a savory scent of frying meat.  Sylvia had smelled brewing tea and baking bread in Squire Payne’s house, and she had heard old Margaret, the Scotch woman who had lived with the squire’s family ever since she could remember, stepping around in another room.  Old Margaret was almost the only servant, the only regular and permanent servant, in Pembroke, and she enjoyed a curious sort of menial distinction:  she dressed well, wore a handsome cashmere shawl which had come from Scotland, and held her head high in the squire’s pew.  People saluted her with respect, and her isolation of inequality gave her a reversed dignity.