There was a pause. The eyes of the mother and daughter met in the half-darkness of the room. There was a lull in the whistling of the wind outside. Under the floor a hen with a brood of chickens was clucking uneasily and flapping her wings in the effort to keep her brood warm. Across the passage came the rasping sound of Sam’s snoring, as unconscious of tragedy as he had been in his cradle, and yet its creeping shadow lay over his placid features, its bated breath filled the air he was breathing. Virginia leaned forward wonderingly, her lips parted and set in anxiety. "You are thinking about the debt on the farm?" she ventured. "If that’s it, mother, remember—" "The debt on this paltry shack and few acres of rocky land? Huh! if that was all I had to complain about I’d bounce out of this bed and shout for joy. Oh, Lord, have mercy on me!" "Then, mother, what—" Virginia drew herself up with a start. Her mother, it now struck her, had said her trouble was due to a discovery she had made that morning. What else could it be than that her mother had accidentally seen her in company with Ann Boyd? Yes, that was it, and Virginia hastily told herself that some satisfying explanation must be made, some plausible and pacifying reason must be forthcoming that would allay her mother’s anger, but it was hard to lie, in open words, as she had been doing in act. The gentle girl shuddered before the impending ordeal and clinched her hands in her lap. Yes, it was hard to lie, and yet the truth—the _whole_ truth—was impossible. "Mother," she began, "you see—I suppose I’ll have to confess to you that Mrs. Boyd and I—" "Don’t blacken your soul with lies!" her mother hurled at her, furiously. "I slipped up in a few feet of you both at the spring and saw you kissing her, and heard you tell her you loved her more than anybody in the world, and that she’d treated you better than I ever did, and that she was the best woman that ever lived. Explain all that, if you can, but don’t set there and lie to me who gave you what life you’ve got, and toiled and stinted and worked my hands to the bone to raise, you and let you hold your own with others. If there’s a speck of truth in you, don’t deny what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my two ears." "I’ll not deny it, then," Virginia said. She rose and moved to the small-paned window and stood with her face turned away. "I have met Mrs. Boyd several times and talked to her. I don’t think she has ever had justice done her by you and her neighbors; she is not rightly understood, and, feeling that you have been all along the chief influence against her, and have always kept her early trouble stirred up, I felt like being her friend as well as I could, and at the same time remain true to you."