Then came a night when the four sisters huddled breathlessly in the kitchen, and Aunt Grace and the trained nurse stayed with Prudence behind the closed door of the front room up-stairs. And the doctor went in, too, after he had inflicted a few light-hearted remarks upon the two men in the little library. After that--silence, an immense hushing silence,--settled down over the parsonage. Jerry and Mr. Starr, alone in the library, where a faint odor of drugs, anesthetics, something that smelled like hospitals lingered, stared away from each other with persistent determination. Now and then Jerry walked across the room, but Mr. Starr stood motionless by the window looking down at the cherry tree beneath him, wondering vaguely how it dared to be so full of snowy blooms! "Where are the girls?" Jerry asked, picking up a roll of cotton which had been left on the library table, and flinging it from him as though it scorched his fingers. "I--think I'll go and see," said Mr. Starr, turning heavily. Jerry hesitated a minute. "I--think I'll go along," he said. For an instant their eyes met, sympathetically, and did not smile though their lips curved. Down in the kitchen, meanwhile, Fairy sat somberly beside the table with a pile of darning which she jabbed at viciously with the needle. Lark was perched on the ice chest, but Carol, true to her childish instincts, hunched on the floor with her feet curled beneath her. Connie leaned against the table within reach of Fairy's hand. "They're awfully slow," she complained once. Nobody answered. The deadly silence clutched them. "Oh, talk," Carol blurted out desperately. "You make me sick! It isn't anything to be so awfully scared about. Everybody does it." A little mumble greeted this, and then, silence again. Whenever it grew too painful, Carol said reproachfully, "Everybody does it." And no one ever answered. They looked up expectantly when the men entered. It seemed cozier somehow when they were all together in the little kitchen. "Is she all right?" "Sure, she's all right," came the bright response from their father. And then silence. "Oh, you make me sick," cried Carol. "Everybody does it." "Carol Starr, if you say 'everybody does it' again I'll send you to bed," snapped Fairy. "Don't we know everybody does it? But Prudence isn't everybody." "Maybe we'd better have a lunch," suggested their father hopefully, knowing the thought of food often aroused his family when all other means had failed. But his suggestion met with dark reproach. "Father, if you're hungry, take a piece of bread out into the woodshed," begged Connie. "If anybody eats anything before me I shall jump up and down and scream." Their father smiled faintly and gave it up. After that the silence was unbroken save once when Carol began encouragingly: "Every--" "Sure they do," interrupted Fairy uncompromisingly. And then--the hush.