Mrs. Holder came to a dead stop and looked at her.
"Did I know what?" reiterated Mrs. Deans majestically.
"Did you know—Myron—" she stopped, this thing was difficult to frame in words.
"Well?" said Mrs. Deans.
"Did you know Myron was—would be—had—" again the voluble Mrs. Holder faltered. Mrs. Deans looked at Mrs. Holder—and something whispered to her what Mrs. Holder could not say. "Do you mean to tell me—" she paused—filling up the hiatus with an eloquent look.
Then she loosened the tides of her indignation, and sweeping aside all memories of Myron's honesty, and faithful service, and patience, launched against her the full flood of her invective.
Presently Mrs. Holder chimed in: there was something absurd yet tragically repulsive in these two women, but a moment before reviling each other, now absorbed only in the desire to outvie each other in the epithets they hurled against the girl—the granddaughter of the one, the uncomplaining servant of the other.
Their attitude, however, was prophetically typical of the treatment Myron Holder was to receive. The whole village forgot its private quarrels to point the finger at its common victim. Beset with all the frightful anticipations of motherhood, bowed beneath the burden of a shame she appreciated and accepted, hounded nearly to madness by her grandmother's jibes and reproaches, Myron Holder's heart was wellnigh desperate.
The spring winds brought her dreadful suggestions of despair. The first hepaticas shone up at her as balefully as the lighted fagots to a martyr's eye. The springing hopvines seemed to twine their tendrils tight and tighter about her heart. All the scents and sounds of spring were ever after to her an exquisite torture. But her soul was of strong fibre.
Before all the scorn of the village, all the rebukes of Mrs. Deans, all the wrath of her grandmother, all the bitterness and misery and hopelessness of her own heart, Myron Holder was mute.