frilled about with lace, drooping like the raceme of
some white flower in one of the windows.

"That's her at the window," whispered the Pembroke woman, "an'
there's Richard out there in the bean-poles." Just then Richard
peered out at them from the green ranks of the beans at the sound of
their wheels, and the Pembroke woman nodded, with a cough.

They drove slowly out of the old road into the main-travelled one,
and presently passed the old Thayer house. A woman's figure fled
hurriedly up the yard into the house as they approached. There was a
curious shrinking look about her as she fled, her very clothes, her
muslin skirts, her light barege shawl, her green bonnet, seemed to
slant away before the eyes of the two women who were watching her.

The Pembroke woman leaned close to her cousin's ear, and whispered
with a sharp hiss of breath. The cousin started and colored red all
over her matronly face and neck. She stared with a furtive shamed air
at poor Rebecca hastening into her house. The door closed after her
with a quick slam.

It was always to Rebecca, years beyond her transgression, admitted
ostensibly to her old standing in the village, as if an odor of
disgrace and isolation still clung to her, shaken out from her every
motion from the very folds of her garments. It came in her own
nostrils wherever she went, like a miserable emanation of her own
personality. She always shrank back lest others noticed it, and she
always would. She particularly shunned strangers. The sight of a
strange woman clothed about with utter respectability and strictest
virtue intimidated her beyond her power of self-control, for she
always wondered if she had been told about her, and realized that, if
she had, her old disgrace had assumed in this new mind a hideous
freshness.

After the door had slammed behind Rebecca the two women drove home,
and the guest was presently feasted on company-fare for supper, and
all these strange tragedies and histories to which she had listened
had less of a savor in her memory, than the fine green tea and the
sweet cake on her tongue. The hostess, too, did not have them in mind
any longer; she pressed the plum-cake and hot biscuits and honey on
her cousin, in lieu of gossip, for entertainment. The stories were
old to her, except as she found a new listener to them, and they had
never had any vital interest for her. They had simply made her
imagination twang pleasantly, and now they could hardly st