“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.”