Again the visiting cousin peered out.  “She’s good-lookin’, ain’t she?” she remarked, cautiously viewing Charlotte’s straight figure and fair face as she came towards them out of the yard.

“She ain’t so good-lookin’ as she used to be,” rejoined the other woman.  “I guess she’s goin’ down to her aunt Sylvy’s—­Sylvy Crane as was.  She married Richard Alger a while ago, after she’d been goin’ with him over twenty year.  He’s fixed up the old Crane place.  It got dreadful run down, an’ Sylvy she actually set out for the poor-house, an’ Richard he stopped Jonathan Leavitt, he was carryin’ of her over there, an’ he brought her home, an’ married her right off.  That brought him to the point.  Sylvy lives on the old road; we can drive round that way when we go home, an’ I’ll show you the place.”

When they presently drove down the green length of the old road, the visiting cousin spied interestedly at Sylvia’s house and Sylvia’s own delicate profile 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.