Then there was another awkward silence, which Mrs. Thrasher broke, with a timidity which she could hardly overcome.
"I should like to see Katharine," she said, "very, very much."
"She cannot see any one now—it is forbidden."
There were a few more faint remarks from Mrs. Thrasher, then the pair turned away. Mrs. Allen closed the door, they walked silently out of the yard and back toward their house, which had never appeared so cheerless to them.
As they passed the butternut tree both the old people turned away their heads, for the remembrance of that morning when they stood together and watched their son making signals from that very spot, for the wretched prisoner to whose presence they had been denied not half an hour before, filled their hearts with sensations which neither of them could ever express.
It was a mournful thing to see those two good souls in their bungling efforts to cheat each other into a belief that no terrible sorrow had fallen upon them. It was all a sad, sad failure.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE SNOW FRESHET.
There was rare confusion and riot at the red school-house. The weather had changed suddenly, the wind blew from the south, the sun lay warm and dazzling upon the snow-drifts; but its treacherous kisses subdued their cold strength and wasted their beauty.
At last it settled into a regular "thaw"—a New England one at that. From the mud, a stranger might have thought the very foundations of the earth had been ploughed up. Every snow bank dissolved itself into a pert little rivulet, that swelled the general tide, and formed a muddy lake on each side of the road, along which horses and men passed so bespattered and stained that one could easily believe they had been formed entirely from clay, and were fast resolving themselves back to the original element.