“Oh my God!” cried Eva.  Andrew shrank from her impatiently.  She made that ejaculation because she was a Loud, and had an off-streak in her blood.  Not one of Andrew’s pure New England stock would have so expressed herself.  He sat down beside the lamp and took up the evening paper.  Eva stood looking at him a minute.  She was quite pale, she was weighing consequences.  Then she went out to her sister.  “Well, you know what’s happened, Fan, I s’pose,” she said.

“Yes, I’m awful sorry, but I tell Andrew it ain’t so bad for us as for some; we sha’n’t starve.”

“I don’t know as I care much whether I starve or not,” said Eva.  “It’s goin’ to make me put off my weddin’; and if I do put it off, Jim and me will never get married at all; I feel it in my bones.”

“Why, what should you have to put it off for?” asked Fanny.

“Why?  I should think you’d know why without askin’.  Ain’t I spent every dollar I have saved up on my weddin’ fixin’s, and Jim, he’s got his mother on his hands, and she’s been sick, and he ain’t saved up anything.  If you s’pose I’m goin’ to marry him and make him any worse off than he is now you’re mistaken.”

“Well, mebbe Jim can work somewhere else, and mebbe Lloyd’s won’t be shut up long,” Fanny said, consolingly.  “I wouldn’t give up so, if I was you.”

“I might jest as well,” Eva returned.  “It’s no use, Jim and me will never get married.”  Eva’s face was curiously set; she was not in the least loud nor violent as was usually the case when she was in trouble, her voice was quite low, and she spoke slowly.

Fanny looked anxiously at her.  “It ain’t as though you hadn’t a roof to cover you,” she said, “for you’ve got mine and Andrew’s as long as we have one ourselves.”

“Do you think I’d live on Andrew long?” demanded Eva.

“You won’t have to.  Jim will get work in a week or two, and you’ll get married.  Don’t act so.  I declare, I’m ashamed of you, Eva Loud.  I thought you had more sense, to give up discouraged at no more than this.  I don’t see why you jump way ahead into trouble before you get to it.”

“I’ve got to it, and I can feel the steam of it in my face,” Eva said, with unconscious imagery.  Then she lit a lamp, and went up-stairs to change her dress before Jim Tenny arrived.

It was snowing hard.  Ellen sat in her place by the window and watched the flakes drive past the radiance of the street-lamp on the corner, and past the reflection of the warm, bright room.  Now she could see, since the light was in the room where she sat, her father beside the table reading his paper, and shadowy images of all the familiar things projecting themselves like a mirage of home into the night and storm.  Ellen could see, even without turning round, that her father looked very sober, and did not seem to be much interested in his paper, and a vague sense of calamity oppressed her.  She did not know just what might be involved in Lloyd’s shutting down,