Fanny Brewster, white-cheeked, with the rasped redness of tears
around her eyes and mouth, clad in her blue calico wrapper, received
them in her best parlor. Eva had made a fire in the best parlor
stove early that morning. "Folks will be comin' in all day, I
expect," said she, speaking with nervous catches of her breath. Ever
since the child had been missed, Eva's anxiety had driven her from
point to point of unrest as with a stinging lash. She had pelted
bareheaded down the road and up the road; she had invaded all the
neighbors' houses, insisting upon looking through their farthest and
most unlikely closets; she had even penetrated to the woods, and
joined wild-eyed the groups of peering workers on the shore of the
nearest pond. That she could not endure long, so she had rushed home
to her sister, who was either pacing her sitting-room with
inarticulate murmurs and wails of distress in the sympathizing ears
of several of the neighboring women, or else was staring with
haggard eyes of fearful hope from a window. When she looked from the
eastern window she could see her mother-in-law, Mrs. Zelotes
Brewster, at an opposite one, sitting immovable, with her Bible in
her lap, prayer in her heart, and an eye of grim holding to faith
upon the road for the fulfilment of promise. She felt all her
muscles stiffen with anger when she saw the wild eyes of the child's
mother at the other window. "It is all her fault," she said to
herself--"all her fault--hers and that bold trollop of a sister of
hers." When she saw Eva run down the road, with her black hair
rising like a mane to the morning wind, she was an embodiment of an
imprecatory psalm. When, later on, she saw the three editors
coming--Mr. Walsey, of _The Spy_, and Mr. Jones, of _The Observer_,
and young Joe Bemis, of _The Star_, on his bicycle--she watched
jealously to see if they were admitted. When Fanny's head