"Tell Mrs. Douglass we are obliged to her, but we do not want the mutton, Barby."
Hugh went to his chopping, and Fleda set out upon her walk the lines of her face settling into a most fixed gravity so soon as she turned away from the house. It was what might be called a fine winter's day cold and still, and the sky covered with one uniform grey cloud. The snow lay in uncompromising whiteness, thick over all the world a kindly shelter for the young grain and covering for the soil; but Fleda's spirits, just then in another mood, saw in it only the cold refusal to hope, and the barren check to exertion. The wind had cleared the snow from the trees and fences, and they stood in all their unsoftened blackness and nakedness, bleak and stern. The high grey sky threatened a fresh fall of snow in a few hours; it was just now a lull between two storms; and Fleda's spirits, that sometimes would have laughed in the face of nature's soberness, to-day sank to its own quiet. Her pace neither slackened nor quickened till she reached aunt Miriam's house, and entered the kitchen.
Aunt Miriam was in high tide of business over a pot of boiling lard, and the enormous bread-tray by the side of the fire was half-full of very tempting light-brown cruller, which, however, were little more than a kind of sweet bread for the workmen. In the bustle of putting in and taking out, aunt Miriam could give her visitor but a word and a look. Fleda pulled off her hood, and sitting down, watched in unusual silence the old lady's operations.
"And how are they all at your house to-day?" aunt Miriam asked, as she was carefully draining her cruller out of the kettle.
Fleda answered that they were as well as usual, but a slight hesitation and the tell-tale tone of her voice made the old lady look at her more narrowly. She came near and kissed that gentle brow, and looking in her eyes, asked her what the matter was?
"I don't know; " said Fleda, eyes and voice wavering alike
"I am foolish, I believe "
Aunt Miriam tenderly put aside the hair from her forehead, and kissed it again, but the cruller was burning, and she went back to the kettle.
"I got down-hearted somehow this morning," Fleda went on, trying to steady her voice and school herself.
"You down-hearted, dear! About what?"
There was a world of sympathy in these words, in the warmth of which Fleda's shut-up heart unfolded itself at once.