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.

There was a wild flutter of hens as they entered. Mrs. Sloane drove
them before her. "The hen-house roof fell in, an' I have to keep 'em
in here," she said, and shooed them and shook her shawl at t