The church-bells rang out next morning through a crisp and frosty air. A dazzling glare of reflected sunshine lay on the dry snow, but it gave no suggestion of warmth. The people who passed on their way to Thanksgiving services walked hurriedly, and looked as if their minds were concentrated on the hope that the sexton had lighted the fire in the church furnace the previous day. The milkman who stopped his sleigh just beyond the house of the Law-tons had to beat off a great rim of chalk-white ice with the dipper before he could open his can.

The younger members of the Lawton family were not dependent upon external evidences, however, for their knowledge that it was bitterly cold. It was nearly noon when they began to gather in the kitchen, and cluster about the decrepit old cooking-stove where burned the only fire in the house. A shivering and unkempt group they made, in the bright daylight, holding their red hands over the cracked stove-lids, and snarling sulkily at the weather and one another when they spoke at all.

Jessica had slept badly, and, rising early and dressing in self-defence against the cold, had found her father in the act of lighting the kitchen fire. An original impulse prompted her to kiss him when she bade him good-morning; and Ben, rising awkwardly from where he had been kneeling in front of the grate, looked both surprised and shamefacedly gratified. It seemed ages since one of his daughters had kissed him before.

“It’s a regular stinger of a morning, ain’t it?” he said, blowing his fingers. “The boards in the sidewalk jest riz up and went off under my feet like pistols last night, when I was coming home.” He added with an accent of uneasiness: “Suppose you didn’t hear me come in?”

He seemed pleased when she shook her head, and his face visibly lightened. He winked at her mysteriously, and going over to a recess in the wall, back of the woodbox, dragged out a lank and dishevelled turkey of a dingy gray color, not at all resembling the fowls that had been presented to him the previous day.

“Trouble with me was,” he said, reflectively, “I shot four turkeys. If I hadn’t been a bang-up shot, and had only killed one, why, I’d been all right. But no, I couldn’t help hitting ’em, and so I got four. Of course, I hadn’t any use for so many: so I got to raffling ’em off, and that’s where my darned luck come in.” He held the bird up, and turned it slowly around, regarding it with an amused chuckle. “You know this cuss ain’t one of them I shot, at all. You see, I got to raffling, and one time I stood to win nine turkeys and a lamp and a jag of firewood. But then the thing kind o’ turned, and went agin me, and darn me if I didn’t come out of the little end of the horn, with nothing but this here. Sh-h!—M’rye’s coming. Don’t say nothing to her. I told her I earnt it carrying in some coal.”

Mrs. Lawton entered the room as her husband was putting back the turkey. She offered no remarks beyond a scant “mornin’!” to Jessica, and directed a scowl toward Lawton, before which he promptly disappeared. She replied curtly in the negative when Jessica asked if there was anything she could do; but the novelty of the offer seemed to slowly impress her mind, for after a time she began to talk of her own accord. Ben had come home drunk the night before, she said; there wasn’t anything new in that, but it was decidedly new for him to bring something to eat with him. He said he’d been carrying in coal, which was her reason for believing he had been really shaving shingles or breaking up old barrels. He couldn’t tell the truth if he tried—it wasn’t in him not to lie. The worst of his getting drunk was he was so pesky good-natured the next day. Her father used always to have a headache under similar conditions, and make things peculiarly interesting for everybody round about, from her mother at the helm of the boat to the nigger-boy and the mule on the tow-path ahead. That was the way all other men behaved, too: that is, all who were good for anything. But Ben, he just grinned and did more chores than usual, and hung around generally, as if everybody was bound to like him because he had made a fool of himself.

This monologue of information and philosophy was not delivered consecutively, but came in disjointed and irrelevant instalments, spread over a considerable space of time. There was nothing in it all which suggested a reply, and Jessica did not even take the trouble to listen very attentively. Her own thoughts were a more than sufficient occupation.

The failure of the experiment upon which she had ventured was looming in unpleasant bulk before her. Every glance about her, every word which fell upon her ears, furnished an added reason why she was not going to be able to live on the lines she had laid out. Viewed even as a visit, the experience was hateful. Contemplated as a career, it was simply impossible. Rather than bear it, she would go back to Tecumseh or New York; and rather than do this, she would kill herself.

Too depressed to control her thoughts, much less to bend them definitely upon consideration of some possible middle course between suicide and existence in this house, Jessica sat silent at the back of the stove, and suffered. Her evening here with her sisters seemed to blend in retrospect with the sleepless night into one long, confused, intolerable nightmare. They had scarcely spoken to her, and she had not known what to say to them. For some reason they had chosen to stay indoors after supper—although this was plainly not their habit—and under Samantha’s lead had entered into a clumsy conspiracy to make her unhappy by meaning looks, and causeless giggles, and more or less ingenious remarks directed at her, but to one another. Lucinda had indeed seemed to shrink from full communion with this cabal, but she had shown no overt act of friendship, and the three younger girls had been openly hostile. Even after she had taken refuge in her cold room, at an abnormally early hour, her sense of their enmity and her isolation had been kept painfully acute by their loud talk in the hall, and in the chamber adjoining hers. Oh, no!—she was not even going to try to live with them, she said resolutely and with set teeth to herself.

They straggled into the kitchen now, and Lucinda was the only one of them who said “good-morning” to her. Jessica answered her greeting almost with effusion, but she would have had her tongue torn out rather than allow it to utter a solitary first word to the others. They stood about the stove for a time, and then sat down to the bare kitchen table upon which the maternal slattern had spread a kind of breakfast. Jessica took her place silently, and managed to eat a little of the bread, dipped in pork fat. The coffee, a strange, greasy, light-brown fluid without milk, she could not bring herself to touch. There was no butter.

After this odious meal was over Samantha brought down a cheap novel, and ensconced herself at the side of the stove, with her feet on a stick of wood in the oven. The twins, after some protest, entered lazily upon the task of plucking the turkey. Lucinda drew a chair to the window, and began some repairs on her bonnet. For sheer want of other employment, Jessica stood by the window for a time, looking down upon this crude millinery. Then she diffidently asked to be allowed to suggest some changes, and Lucinda yielded the chair to her; and her deft fingers speedily wrought such a transformation in the work that the owner made an exclamation of delight. At this the twins left their turkey to come over and look, and even Samantha at last quitted the stove and sauntered to the window with an exaggerated show of indifference. She looked on for a moment, and then returned with a supercilious sniff, which scared the twins also away. When the hat was finished, and Lucinda had tried it on with obvious satisfaction, Jessica asked her to go for a little walk, and the two went out together.

There was a certain physical relief in escaping from the close and evil-smelling kitchen into the keen, clear cold, but of mental comfort there was little. The sister had nothing beyond a few commonplaces to offer in the way of conversation, and Jessica was in no mood to create small-talk. She walked vigorously forward as far as the sidewalks were shovelled, indifferent to direction and to surroundings, and intent only upon the angry and distracting thoughts which tore one another in her mind. It was not until the drifts forced them to turn that she spoke.

“I always dread to get downright mad: it makes me sick,” she exclaimed, in defiant explanation to the dull Lucinda, who did not seem to have enjoyed her walk.

“If I was you, I wouldn’t mind ’em,” said the sister.

“You just keep a stiff upper lip and tend to your own knitting, and they’ll be coming around in no time to get you to fix their bonnets for ’em. I bet you Samanthy’ll have her brown plush hat to pieces, and be bringing it to you before Sunday.”

“She’ll have to bring it to me somewhere else, then. To-day’s my last day in that house, and don’t you forget it!”