Her aunt started, but she would not get up; she knitted, scowling. “I cannot afford to idle if other folk can,” said she. “I have no desire to keep running to windows and standing there gaping, as you have done all this day.” “Oh, aunt, I pray you to come,” said Silence, and she turned her white face over her shoulder towards her aunt; “there is somewhat wrong surely.” Widow Bishop got up, still scowling, and went over to the window. Silence stood aside and pointed to the little clear circle in the midst of the frost. “Over there to the north,” she said, in a quick, low voice. Her aunt adjusted her horn spectacles and bent her head stiffly. “I see naught,” said she. “A red glare in the north!” “A red glare in the north! Be ye out of your mind, wench! There be no red glare in the north. Everything be quiet in the town. Get ye away from the window and to your work. I have no more patience with such doings. Here have I left my knitting for nothing, and I just about setting the heel. You’d best keep to your spinning instead of spying out of the window at your own nightmares, and gadding about the town after David Walcott. Pretty doings for a modest maid, I call it, following after young men in this fashion!” Silence turned on her aunt, and her blue eyes gleamed dark; she held up her head like a queen. “I follow not after young men,” she said. “Heard I not David Walcott’s voice at the door? Went you not to Goodwife Sheldon’s, where he lives? Was it not his voice--hey?” “Yes, ’twas, an’ I had a right to go there an I chose, an’ ’twas naught unmaidenly,” said Silence. “’Twas unmaidenly in my day,” retorted her aunt; “perhaps ’tis different now.” She had returned to her seat, and was clashing her knitting-needles like two swords in a duel. Silence pulled a spinning-wheel before the fire and fell to work. The wheel turned so rapidly that the spokes were a revolving shadow; there was a sound as if a bee had entered the room. “I stayed at home, and your uncle did the courting,” Widow Eunice Bishop continued, in a voice that demanded response. But Silence made none. She went on spinning. Her aunt eyed her maliciously. “I never went after nightfall to his house that he might see me home,” said she. “I trow my mother would have locked me up in the garret, and kept me on meal and water for a week, had I done aught so bold.”