“Oh, Charlotte!  I’m afraid you hadn’t better,” wailed Sarah.

Charlotte stood before them both.  “Look here, father and mother,” said she.  “I’ve never gone against your wishes in my life, but now I’m going to.  It’s my duty to.  I was going to marry him once.”

“You didn’t marry him,” said Cephas.

“I was willing to marry him, and that amounts to the same thing for any woman,” said Charlotte.  “It is just as much my duty to go to him when he’s sick; I am going.  There’s no use talking, I am going.”

“You needn’t come home again, then,” said her father.

“Oh, Cephas!” Sarah cried out.  “Charlotte, don’t go against your father’s wishes!  Charlotte!”

But Charlotte shut the door and hurried up-stairs to her room.  Her mother followed her, trembling.  Cephas sat still, dangling his stocking-feet clear of the floor.  He had an ugly look on his face.  Presently he heard the two women coming down-stairs, and his wife’s sobbing, pleading voice; then he heard the parlor door shut; Charlotte had gone through the house, and out the front door.

Sarah came in, sniffing piteously.  “Oh, Cephas! don’t you be hard on the poor child; she felt as if she had got to go,” she said, chokingly.

Cephas got up, went padding softly and cautiously in his stocking-feet across the floor to the sink, and took a long drink with loud gulps out of the gourd in the water-pail.

“I don’t want to have no more talk about it; I’ve said my say,” said he, with a hard breath, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Charlotte, with a little bundle under her arm, hastened down the hill.  When she reached Barney’s house she went around and knocked at the side door.  As she went into the yard she could see dimly a white-capped woman’s head in a south window of the Thayer house farther down the road, and she knew that Rebecca’s nurse was watching her.  Rebecca’s second baby was a week old, so she could do nothing for her brother.

Charlotte knocked softly and waited.  She heard a loud clamping step across the floor inside, and a whistle.  A boy opened the door and stood staring at her, half abashed, half impudently important, his mouth still puckered with the whistle.

“Is there anybody here but you, Ezra?” asked Charlotte.

The boy shook his head.

“I have come to take care of Mr. Thayer now,” said Charlotte.

She entered, and Ezra Ray stood aside, rolling his eyes after her as she went through the kitchen.  He whistled again half involuntarily, a sudden jocular pipe on the brink of motion, like a bird.  Charlotte turned and shook her head at him, and he stopped short.  He sat down on a chair near the door, and dangled his feet irresolutely.

Charlotte went into the bedroom where Barney lay, a rigidly twisted, groaning heap under a mass of bed-clothing, which Ezra Ray had kept over him with energy.  She bent over him.  “I’ve come to take care of you, Barney,” said she.  His eyes, half dazed in his burning face, looked up at her with scarcely any surprise.