The voice had sounded like Mary Sheldon’s to Freedom. The tears rolled over his boyish cheeks as he put his hands into the snow and tried to dig it away from the dead man’s face. “David! David! David!” called Silence. Suddenly her aunt threw a wiry arm around her. “Be you gone clean daft,” she shrieked against the wind, “standing here calling David Walcott? Know you not he is a half-day’s journey towards Canada an the savages have not scalped him and left him by the way? Standing here with your hair blowing and no blanket! Into the house with ye!” Silence followed her aunt unresistingly. The women in Ensign Sheldon’s house were hard at work. They were baking in the great brick oven, spinning, and even dipping poor Goodwife Sheldon’s candles. “Bind up your hair, like an honest maid, and go to spinning,” said Eunice, and she pointed to the spinning-wheel which had been saved from her own house. “We that be spared have to work, and not sit down and trot our own hearts on our knees. There is scarce a yard of linen left in Deerfield, to say naught of woollen cloth. Bind up your hair!” And Silence bound up her hair, and sat down by her wheel meekly, and yet with a certain dignity. Indeed, through all the disorder of her mind, that delicate maiden dignity never forsook her, and there was never aught but respect shown her. As time went on, it became quite evident that although the fair semblance of Silence Hoit still walked the Deerfield street, sat in the meeting-house, and toiled at the spinning-wheel and the loom, yet she was as surely not there as though she had been haled to Canada with the other captives on that terrible February night. It became the general opinion that Silence Hoit would never be quite her old self again and walk in the goodly company of all her fair wits unless David Walcott should be redeemed from captivity and restored to her. Then, it was accounted possible, the mending of the calamity which had brought her disorder upon her might remove it. “Ye wait,” Widow Eunice Bishop would say, hetchelling flax the while as though it were the scalp-locks of the enemy--“ye wait. If once David Walcott show his face, ye’ll see Silence Hoit be not so lacking. She hath a tenderer heart than some I could mention, who go about smiling when their nearest of kin lie in torment in Indian lodges. She cares naught for picking up a new sweetheart. She hath a steady heart that be not so easy turned as some. Silence was never a light hussy, a-dancing hither and thither off the bridle-path for a new flower on the bushes. An’, for all ye call her lacking now, there be not a maid in Deerfield does such a day’s task as she.”