When she went to bed she stowed away her money under the feather-bed. She could not go to sleep. Some time in the night a shutter in another room up-stairs banged. She got up, lighted the candle, and trod over the icy floors to the room relentlessly with her bare feet. There was a pane of glass broken behind the shutter, and the wind had loosened the fastening. Sylvia forced the shutter back; in a strange rage she heard another pane of glass crack. "I don't care if every pane of glass in the window is broken," she muttered, as she hooked the fastening with angry, trembling fingers. Her thin body in its cotton night-gown, cramped with long rigors of cold, her delicate face reddened as if before a fire, her jaws felt almost locked as she went through the deadly cold of the lonely house back to bed; but that strange rage in her heart enabled her to defy it, and awakened within her something like blasphemy against life and all the conditions thereof, but never against Richard Alger. She never felt one throb of resentment against him. She even wondered, when she was back in bed, if he had bedclothing enough, if the quilts and bed-puffs that his mother had left were not worn out; her own were very thin. The next day Sylvia heated her brick oven; she went to the store and bought materials, and made pound-cake and pies. While they were baking she ran over and invited Charlotte and her mother. She did not see Cephas; he had gone to draw some wood. "I'd like to have him come, too," she said, as she went out; "but I dunno as he'd eat anything I've got for tea." "Land! he eats anything when he goes out anywhere to tea," replied Mrs. Barnard. "He was over to Hannah's a while ago, an' he eat everything. He eats pie-crust with shortenin' now, anyway. He got so he couldn't stan' it without. I guess he'd like to come. He'll have to draw wood some this afternoon, but he can come in time for tea. I'll lay out his clothes on the bed for him." "Well, have him come, then," said Sylvia. Sylvia was nearly out of the yard when Charlotte called after her: "Don't you want me to come over and help you, Aunt Sylvia?" she called out. She stood in the door with her apron flying out in the wind like a blue flag. "No, I guess not," replied Sylvia; "I don't need any help. I ain't got much to do." "I think Aunt Sylvia looks sick," Charlotte said to her mother when she went in. "I thought she looked kind of peaked," said Sarah. But neither of them dreamed of the true state of affairs: how poor Sylvia Crane, half-starved and half-frozen in heart and stomach, was on the verge of bankruptcy of all her little worldly possessions. Sylvia's sisters, practical enough in other respects, were singularly ignorant and incompetent concerning any property except the few dollars and cents in their own purses.