ah never spoke of Rebecca; neither Caleb nor Ephraim dared
mention her name in her hearing.

Although Deborah never asked a question, and although people were shy
of alluding to Rebecca, she yet seemed to know, in some occult and
instinctive fashion, all about her.

When a funeral procession passed the Thayer house one afternoon
Deborah knew quite well whose little coffin was in the hearse,
although she could scarcely have said that anybody had told her.

Caleb came to her after dinner, with a strange, defiant air. "I want
a clean dicky, mother; I'm agoin'," said he. And Deborah got out the
old man's Sunday clothes for him without a word. She even brushed his
hair with hard, careful strokes, and helped him on with his
great-coat; but she never said a word about Rebecca and her baby's
funeral.

"They had some white posies on it," Caleb volunteered, tremblingly,
when he got home.

Deborah made no reply.

"There was quite a lot there," added Caleb.

"Go an' bring me in some kindlin' wood," said Deborah.

Ephraim stood by, staring alternately at his father and mother. He
had watched the funeral procession pass with furtive interest.

"It won't hurt you none to make a few lamp-lighters," said his
mother. "You set right down here, an' I'll get you some paper."

Ephraim clapped his hand to his side, and rolled his eyes agonizingly
towards his mother, but she took no notice. She got some paper out of
the cupboard, and Ephraim sat down and began quirling it into long
spirals with a wretched sulky air.

Since his sister's marriage Ephraim had had a sterner experience than
had ever fallen to his lot before. His mother redoubled her
discipline over him. It was as if she had resolved, since all her
vigorous training had failed in the case of his sister, that she
would intensify it to such purpose that it should not fail with him.

So strait and narrow was the path in which Ephraim was forced to
tread those wintry days, so bound and fettered was he by precept and
admonition, that it seemed as if his very soul could do no more than
shuffle along where his mother pointed.

A scanty and simple diet had Ephraim, and it seemed to him not so
much from a solicitude for his health as from a desire to mortify his
flesh for the good of his spirit. Ephraim obeyed perforce; he was
sincerely afraid of his mother, but he had within him a dogged and
growing resentment against those attempts to improve his spirit.

Not a bit of cak