me thing for
any woman," said Charlotte. "It is just as much my duty to go to him
when he's sick; I am going. There's no use talking, I am going."

"You needn't come home again, then," said her father.

"Oh, Cephas!" Sarah cried out. "Charlotte, don't go against your
father's wishes! Charlotte!"

But Charlotte shut the door and hurried up-stairs to her room. Her
mother followed her, trembling. Cephas sat still, dangling his
stocking-feet clear of the floor. He had an ugly look on his face.
Presently he heard the two women coming down-stairs, and his wife's
sobbing, pleading voice; then he heard the parlor door shut;
Charlotte had gone through the house, and out the front door.

Sarah came in, sniffing piteously. "Oh, Cephas! don't you be hard on
the poor child; she felt as if she had got to go," she said,
chokingly.

Cephas got up, went padding softly and cautiously in his
stocking-feet across the floor to the sink, and took a long drink
with loud gulps out of the gourd in the water-pail.

"I don't want to have no more talk about it; I've said my say," said
he, with a hard breath, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Charlotte, with a little bundle under her arm, hastened down the
hill. When she reached Barney's house she went around and knocked at
the side door. As she went into the yard she could see dimly a
white-capped woman's head in a south window of the Thayer house
farther down the road, and she knew that Rebecca's nurse was watching
her. Rebecca's second baby was a week old, so she could do nothing
for her brother.

Charlotte knocked softly and waited. She heard a loud clamping step
across the floor inside, and a whistle. A boy opened the door and
stood staring at her, half abashed, half impudently important, his
mouth still puckered with the whistle.

"Is there anybody here but you, Ezra?" asked Charlotte.

The boy shook his head.

"I have come to take care of Mr. Thayer now," said Charlotte.

She entered, and Ezra Ray stood aside, rolling his eyes after her as
she went through the kitchen. He whistled again half involuntarily, a
sudden jocular pipe on the brink of motion, like a bird. Charlotte
turned and shook her head at him, and he stopped short. He sat down
on a chair near the door, and dangled his feet irresolutely.

Charlotte went into the bedroom where Barney lay, a rigidly twisted,
groaning heap under a mass of bed-clothing, which Ezra Ray had kept
over him with energy. She be