"Much as ever as she'll let me in, poor girl," responded William,
looking miserably aside from his sister's eyes and weighing out some
meal.
"She wouldn't let mother in if she went there," said Rose. She felt a
little piqued at Rebecca's refusing her admittance. It was as if all
her pity and generous sympathy had been thrust back upon her, and her
pride in it swamped.
"There's no danger of her going there," William returned, bitterly.
And there was not. Hannah Berry would have set herself up in a
pillory as soon as she would have visited her son's wife. She
scarcely went into a neighbor's lest she should hear some allusion to
it.
Rebecca's father often walked past her house with furtive, wistful
eyes towards the windows. Once or twice when nobody was looking he
knocked timidly, but he never got any response. He always took a
circuitous route home, that his wife might not know where he had
been. Deborah never spoke of Rebecca; neither Caleb nor Ephraim dared
mention her name in her hearing.
Although Deborah never asked a question, and although people were shy
of alluding to Rebecca, she yet seemed to know, in some occult and
instinctive fashion, all about her.
When a funeral procession passed the Thayer house one afternoon
Deborah knew quite well whose little coffin was in the hearse,
although she could scarcely have said that anybody had told her.
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