At last, one afternoon, she drove herself over to Bolton in the chaise to buy the dress.  She went to Bolton, because she would not go herself to Silas Berry’s store and trade with William.  She could send Caleb there for household goods, but this dress she would trust no one but herself to purchase.

She had planned that Rebecca should go with her, but the girl looked so utterly wan and despairing that day that she forbore to insist upon it.  Caleb would have accompanied her, but she would not let him.  “I never did think much of men-folks standin’ round in stores gawpin’ while women-folks was tradin’,” said she.  She would not allow Ephraim to go, although he pleaded hard.  It was quite a cold day, and she was afraid of the sharp air for his laboring breath.

A little after noon she set forth, all alone in the chaise, slapping the reins energetically over the white horse’s back, a thick green veil tied over her bonnet under her chin, and the thin, sharp wedge of face visible between the folds crimsoning in the frosty wind.

While she was gone Rebecca sat beside the window and sewed, Caleb shelled corn in the chimney-corner, and Ephraim made a pretence of helping him.  “You set down an’ help your father shell corn while I am gone,” his mother had sternly ordered.

Occasionally Ephraim addressed whining remonstrances to his father, and begged to be allowed to go out-of-doors, and Caleb would quiet him with one effectual rejoinder:  “You know she won’t like it if you do, sonny.  You know what she said.”

Caleb, as he shelled the corn with the pottering patience of old age and constitutional slowness, glanced now and then at his daughter in the window.  He thought she looked very badly, and he had all the time lately the bewildered feeling of a child who sees in a familiar face the marks of emotions unknown to it.

“Don’t you feel as well as common to-day, Rebecca?” he asked once, and cleared his throat.

“I don’t feel sick, as I know of, any day,” replied Rebecca, shortly, and her face reddened.

As she sewed she looked out now and then at the wild December day, the trees reeling in the wind, and the sky driving with the leaden clouds.  It was too cold and too windy to snow all the afternoon, but towards night it moderated, and the wind died down.  When Mrs. Thayer came home it was snowing quite hard, and her green veil was white when she entered the kitchen.  She took it off and shook it, sputtering moisture in the fireplace.

“There’s goin’ to be a hard storm; it’s lucky I went to-day,” said she.  “I kept the dress under the buffalo-robe, an’ that ain’t hurt any.”

Deborah waxed quite angry, when she proudly shook out the soft gleaming crimson lengths of thibet, because Rebecca showed so little interest in it.  “You don’t deserve to have a new dress; you act like a stick of wood,” she said.

Rebecca made no reply.  Presently, when she had gone out of the room for something, Caleb said, anxiously, “I guess she don’t feel quite so well as common to-night.”