'Lizabeth knew that some part of the old man's hoard lay up-stairs in the room with him.

Of late she had, under his eye, taken from a silver tankard in the tall chest by the bed such moneys as from week to week were wanted to pay the farm hands; and she had seen papers there, too--title-deeds, maybe.

The house itself lay in a cup of the hill-side, backed with steep woods--so steep that, in places, anyone who had reasons (good or bad) for doing so, might well see in at any window he chose.

And to Hooper's Farm, down the valley, was a far cry for help.

Meditating on this, 'Lizabeth stepped to the kitchen window and closed the shutter; then, reaching down an old horse-pistol from the rack above the mantelshelf, she fetched out powder and bullet and fell to loading quietly, as one who knew the trick of it.
And yet the sense of danger was not so near as that of loneliness--of a pervading silence without precedent in her experience, as if its master's soul in flitting had, whatever Scripture may say, taken something out of the house with it.