Sylvia, with the roof settling over her head, with not so much upon her few sterile acres to feed her as to feed the honey-bees and birds, with her heart in greater agony because its string of joy had been strained so high and sweetly before it snapped, did not lament over herself at all; neither did she over the other woman who lay up-stairs suffering in a similar case.  She lamented only over Richard living alone and unministered to until he died.

When daylight came she got up, dressed herself, and prepared breakfast.  Charlotte came down before it was ready.  “Let me help get breakfast,” she said, with an assumption of energy, standing in the kitchen doorway in her pretty mottled purple delaine.  The purple was the shade of columbine, and very becoming to Charlotte.  In spite of her sleepless night, her fine firm tints had not faded; she was too young and too strong and too full of involuntary resistance.  She had done up her fair hair compactly; her chin had its usual proud lift.

Sylvia, shrinking as if before some unseen enemy as she moved about, her face all wan and weary, glanced at her half resentfully.  “I guess she ’ain’t had any such night as I have,” she thought.  “Girls don’t know much about it.”

“No, I don’t need any help,” she replied, aloud.  “I ’ain’t got anything to do but to stir up an Injun cake.  You’ve got your best dress on.  You’d better go and sit down.”

“It won’t hurt my dress any.”  Charlotte glanced down half scornfully at her purple skirt.  It had lost all its glory for her.  She was not even sure that Barney had seen it.

“Set down.  I’ve got breakfast ’most ready,” Sylvia said, again, more peremptorily than she was wont, and Charlotte sat down in the hollow-backed cherry rocking-chair beside the kitchen window, leaned her head back, and looked out indifferently between the lilac-bushes.  The bushes were full of pinkish-purple buds.  Sylvia’s front yard reached the road in a broad slope, and the ground was hard, and green with dampness under the shade of a great elm-tree.  The grass would never grow there over the roots of the elm, which were flung out broadly like great recumbent limbs over the whole yard, and were barely covered by the mould.

Across the street, seen under the green sweep of the elm, was an orchard of old apple-trees which had blossomed out bravely that spring.  Charlotte looked at the white and rosy masses of bloom.

“I guess there wasn’t any frost last night, after all,” she remarked.

“I dunno,” responded Sylvia, in a voice which made her niece look around at her.  There was a curious impatient ring in it which was utterly foreign to it.  There was a frown between Sylvia’s gentle eyes, and she moved with nervous jerks, setting down dishes hard, as if they were refractory children, and lashing out with spoons as if they were whips.  The long, steady strain upon her patience had not affected her temper, but this last had seemed to bring out a certain vicious and waspish element which nobody had suspected her to possess, and she herself least of all.  She felt this morning disposed to go out of her way to sting, and as if some primal and evil instinct had taken possession of her.  She felt shocked at herself, but all the more defiant and disposed to keep on.