Rebecca hastened trembling down the road.  She made no reply, but she knew that Rose was quite right, and that she had attacked her with futile reproaches in order to save herself from shame in her own eyes.  Rebecca knew quite well that in spite of her hesitation and remonstrances, in spite of her maiden shrinking on the threshold of the store, she had come to see William Berry.  She had been glad, although she had turned a hypocritical face towards her own consciousness, that Ephraim was not well enough and she was obliged to go.  Her heart had leaped with joy when Rose had proposed William’s walking home with her, but when he refused she was crushed with shame.  “He thought I came to see him,” she kept saying to herself as she hurried along, and there was no falsehood that she would not have sworn to to shield her modesty from such a thought on his part.

When she got home and entered the kitchen, she kept her face turned away from her mother.  “Here’s the sugar,” she said, and she took it out of the basket and placed it on the table.

“How much did he give you?” asked Deborah Thayer; she was standing beside the window beating eggs.  Over in the field she could catch a glimpse of Barnabas now and then between the trees as he passed with his plough.

“About two pounds.”

“That was doin’ pretty well.”

Rebecca said nothing.  She turned to go out of the room.

“Where are you going?” her mother asked, sharply.  “Take off your bonnet.  I want you to beat up the butter and sugar; this cake ought to be in the oven.”

Deborah’s face, as she beat the eggs and made cake, looked as full of stern desperation as a soldier’s on the battle-field.  Deborah never yielded to any of the vicissitudes of life; she met them in fair fight like enemies, and vanquished them, not with trumpet and spear, but with daily duties.  It was a village story how Deborah Thayer cleaned all the windows in the house one afternoon when her first child had died in the morning.  To-day she was in a tumult of wrath and misery over her son; her mouth was so full of the gall of bitterness that no sweet on earth could overcome it; but she made sweet cake.

Rebecca took off her sun-bonnet and hung it on a peg; she got a box from the pantry, and emptied the sugar into in, still keeping her face turned away as best she could from her mother’s eyes.

Deborah looked approvingly at the sugar.  “It’s nigher three pounds than anything else.  I guess you were kind of favored, Rebecca.  Did William wait on you?”

“Yes, he did.”

“I guess you were kind of favored,” Deborah repeated, and a half-smile came over her grim face.

Rebecca said nothing.  She got some butter, and fell to work with a wooden spoon, creaming the butter and sugar in a brown wooden bowl with swift turns of her strong white wrist.  Ephraim watched her sharply; he sat by a window stoning raisins.  His mother had forbidden him to eat any, as she thought them injurious to him; but he carefully calculated his chances, and deposited many in his mouth when she watched Barney; but his jaws were always gravely set when she turned his way.