“The wind's riz powerful suddint,” Peter said, noticing the noise as he came stumbling in, rubbing his eyes. He went and fastened the shutter, while his mother tremulously mended the fire.
The absence of the baby was not noticed for some time, and when the father's hasty and angry questions elicited the reluctant facts, the outcry for his loss was hardly less bitter among the Kittredges than among the Quimbeys. The fugitives were shielded from capture by the enveloping mist, and when Absalom returned from the search he could do naught but indignantly upbraid his mother.
She was terrified by her own deed, and cowered under Absalom's wrath. It was in a moral collapse, she felt, that she could have done this thing. She flung her apron over her head, and sat still and silent—a monumental figure—among them. Once, roused by Absalom's reproaches, she made some effort to defend and exculpate herself, speaking from behind the enveloping apron.
“I ain't born no Kittredge nohow,” she irrelevantly asseverated, “an' I never war. An' when Eveliny axed me how I'd hev liked ter hev another 'oman take Abs'lom whenst he war a baby, I couldn't hold out no longer.”
“Shucks!” cried Absalom, unfilially; “ye'd aheap better be a-studyin' 'bout'n my good now 'n whenst I war a baby—a-givin' away my child ter them Quimbeys; a-h'istin' him out'n the winder!”
She was glad to retort that he was “impident,” and to take refuge in an aggrieved silence, as many another mother has done when outmatched by logic.
After this there was more cheerfulness in her hidden face than might have been argued from her port of important sorrow. “Bes' ter hev no jawin', though,” she said to herself, as she sat thus inscrutably veiled. And deep in her repentant heart she was contradictorily glad that Evelina and the baby were safe together down in the Cove.