“Don’t you let her go, Matt!” cried Harriet. “I’ll quit instead.”
“You!” exclaimed her mother, turning fiercely upon her, while her eyes spat fire. “You are young and wholesome—the world is afore you. You were not brought from a great town to be buried in a wilderness. Marry your Preeps an’ your Micmacs, and nurse your pappooses. God has cursed me with froward children an’ a cripple, an’ a husband that goes gallivantin’ onchristianly about the world with never a thought for his ’mortal soul, an’ the Lord has doomed me to worship Him in the wrong church. Mother yourselves; I throw up the position.”
“Is it my fault if father hesn’t wrote you lately?” cried Harriet. “Is it my fault if there’s no Baptist church to Cobequid village?”
“Shut your mouth, you brazen hussy! You’ve drove your mother to her death! Stand out o’ my way, Matthew; don’t you disobey my dyin’ reques’.”
“I sha’n’t,” said the boy, squaring his shoulders firmly against the door. “Where kin you drownd yourself? The pond’s froze an’ the tide’s out.”
He could think of no other argument for the moment, and he had an incongruous vision of her sliding down to the river on her stomach, as the boys often did, down the steep, reddish-brown slopes of greasy mud, or sinking into a squash-hole like an errant horse.
