to Ivory's farm, Waitstill reflected, and
she could take her sled and slide half the way, going and coming, or she
could cut across the frozen fields on the crust. She caught up her shawl
from a hook on the kitchen door, and, throwing it over her head and
shoulders to shield herself from the chill blasts on the stairway, ran
up to her bedroom to make herself ready for the walk.

She slipped on a quilted petticoat and warmer dress, braided her hair
freshly, while her breath went out in a white cloud to meet the freezing
air; snatched her wraps from her closet, and was just going down the
stairs when she remembered that an hour before, having to bind up a cut
finger for her father, she had searched Patty's bureau drawer for an old
handkerchief, and had left things in disorder while she ran to answer
the Deacon's impatient call and stamp upon the kitchen floor.

"Hurry up and don't make me stan' here all winter!" he had shouted. "If
you ever kept things in proper order, you wouldn't have to hunt all over
the house for a piece of rag when you need it!"

Patty was very dainty about her few patched and darned belongings;
also very exact in the adjustment of her bits of ribbon, her collars of
crocheted thread, her adored coral pendants, and her pile of neat cotton
handkerchiefs, hem-stitched by her own hands. Waitstill, accordingly,
with an exclamation at her own unwonted carelessness, darted into
her sister's room to replace in perfect order the articles she
had disarranged in her haste. She knew them all, these poor little
trinkets,--humble, pathetic evidences of Patty's feminine vanity and
desire to make her bright beauty a trifle brighter.

Suddenly her hand and her eye fell at the same moment on something
hidden in a far corner under a white "fascinator," one of those
head-coverings of filmy wool, dotted with beads, worn by the girls of
the period. She drew the glittering, unfamiliar object forward, and then
lifted it wonderingly in her hand. It was a string of burnished gold
beads, the avowed desire of Patty's heart; a string of beads with
a brilliant little stone in the fastening. And, as if that were not
mystery enough, there was something slipped over the clasped necklace
and hanging from it, as Waitstill held it up to the light--a circlet of
plain gold, a wedding-ring!

Waitstill stood motionless in the cold with such a throng of bewildering
thoughts, misgivings, imaginings, rushing through her head that they
w