Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom was in wild disorder. A candle still burned, although it was very low, on the table, whose linen cover had great red finger-prints on it. Goodwife Sheldon’s decent clothes were tossed about on the floor; the curtains of the bed were half torn away. Silence pressed forward unshrinkingly towards the bed; the others, even the men, hung back. There lay Goodwife Sheldon dead in her bed. All the light in the room, the candle-light and the low daylight, seemed to focus upon her white, frozen profile propped stiffly on the pillow, where she had fallen back when the bullet came through that hole in the door. Silence looked at her. “Where is David, Goodwife Sheldon?” said she. Eunice Bishop sprang forward. “Be you clean out of your mind, Silence Hoit?” she cried. “Know you not she’s dead? She’s dead! Oh, she’s dead, she’s dead! An’ here’s her best silk hood trampled underfoot on the floor!” Eunice snatched up the hood, and seized Silence by the arm, but she pushed her back. “Where is David? Where is he gone?” she demanded again of the dead woman. The other women came crowding around Silence then, and tried to soothe her and reason with her, while their own faces were white with horror and woe. Goodwife Sarah Spear, an old woman whose sons lay dead in the street outside, put an arm around the girl, and tried to draw her head to her broad bosom. “Mayhap you will find him, sweetheart,” she said. “He’s not among the dead out there.” But Silence broke away from the motherly arm, and sped wildly through the other rooms, with the people at her heels, and her aunt crying vainly after her. They found no more dead in the house; naught but ruin and disorder, and bloody footprints and handprints of savages. When they returned to the keeping-room, Silence seated herself on a stool by the fire, and held out her hands towards the blaze to warm them. The daylight was broad outside now, and the great clock that had come from overseas ticked; the Indians had not touched that. Captain Isaac Moulton lifted little Mercy Sheldon from the hearth and carried her to her dead mother in the bedroom, and two of the older women went in there and shut the door. Little Comfort Arms still stood with her back against the outer door, and Grace Mather tended the dead baby on the settle. “What do ye with that dead child?” a woman called out roughly to her. “I tell ye ’tis not dead; it breathes,” returned Grace Mather; and she never turned her harsh, plain face from the dead child. “An’ I tell ye ’tis dead.” “An’ I tell ye ’tis not dead. I need but some hot posset for it.” Goodwife Carson began to weep. She hugged her own living baby tighter. “Let her alone!” she sobbed. “I wonder our wits be not all gone.” She went sobbing over to little Comfort Arms at the door. “Come away, sweetheart, and draw near the fire,” she pleaded, brokenly.