William looked at him for the first time since they started.  “See here, Barney,” he said, “God knows it’s not to shield myself—­I’m past that; but I’ve begged her all summer to be married.  I’ve been down on my knees to her to be married before it came to this.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know, oh, I don’t know!  The poor girl was near distracted.  Her mother forbade her to marry me, and held up her Aunt Rebecca, who married against her parents’ wishes and hung herself, before her, all the time.  Your trouble with Charlotte Barnard brought it all about.  Her mother never opposed it before.  I begged her to marry me, but she was afraid, or something, I don’t know what.”

“Can’t you drive faster?” said Barney.

William had been urging the horse while he spoke, but now he shook the whip over him again.

Mrs. Jim Sloane’s house was a long, unpainted cottage quite near the road.  The woman who lived alone there was under a kind of indefinite ban in the village.  Her husband, who had died several years before, had been disreputable and drunken, and the mantle of his disgrace had seemed to fall upon his wife, if indeed she was not already provided with such a mantle of her own.  Everybody spoke slightingly of Mrs. Jim Sloane.  The men laughed meaningly when they saw her pass, wrapped in an old plaid shawl, which she wore summer and winter, and which seemed almost like a uniform.  Stories were told of her dirt and shiftlessness, of the hens which roosted in her kitchen.  Poor Mrs. Jim Sloane, in her blue plaid shawl, tramping frequently from her solitary house through the village, was a byword and a mocking to all the people.

When William and Barney came abreast of her house they saw the blue flutter of Mrs. Jim Sloane’s shawl out before, above the blue dazzle of the snow.

“Hullo!” she was crying out in her shrill voice, and waving her hand to them to stop.

William pulled the horse up short, and the woman came plunging through the snow close to his side.

“She’s in here,” she said, with a knowing smile.  The faded fair hair blew over her eyes; she pushed it back with a coquettish gesture; there was a battered prettiness about her thin pink-and-white face, turning blue in the sharp wind.

“When did she get here?” asked Barney.

“This forenoon.  She fell down out here, couldn’t get no farther.  I came out an’ got her into the house.  Didn’t know but she was done to; but I fixed her up some hot drink an’ made her lay down.  I s’posed you’d be along.”  She smiled again.

William jumped out of the cutter, and tied the horse to an old fence-post.  Then he and Barney followed the woman into the house.  Barney looked at the old blue plaid shawl with utter disgust and revulsion.  He had always felt a loathing for the woman, and her being a distant relative on his father’s side intensified it.

Mrs. Sloane threw open the door, and bade them enter, as if to a festival.  “Walk right in,” said she.