Barney turned away, blushing also as he stammered an assent.  Always keenly alive to the shame of the matter, it seemed as if his sense of it were for the moment intensified.  The minister’s wife’s whole nature seemed turned into a broadside of mirrors towards Rebecca’s shame and misery, and it was as if the reflection was multiplied in Barney as he looked at her.

Still, he could not take the shame to his own nature as she could, being a woman.  He looked back furtively at the house as he went down the road, thinking he might catch a glimpse of poor Rebecca at the window.

But Rebecca kept herself well hid.  After William had hired the old Bennet house and established her there, she lived with curtains down and doors bolted.  Never a neighbor saw her face at door or window, although all the women who lived near did their housework with eyes that way.  She would not go to the door if anybody knocked.  The caller would hear her scurrying away.  Nobody could gain admittance if William were not at home.

Barney went to the door once, and her voice sounded unexpectedly loud and piteously shrill in response to his knock.

“You can’t come in! go away!” cried Rebecca.

“I don’t want to say anything hard to you,” said Barney.

“Go away, go away!” repeated Rebecca, and then he heard her sob.

“Don’t cry,” pleaded Barney, futilely, through the door.  But he heard his sister’s retreating steps and her sobs dying away in the distance.

He went away, and did not try to see her again.

Rose went to see Rebecca, stealing out of a back door and scudding across snowy fields lest her mother should espy her and stop her.  But Rebecca had not come to the door, although Rose had stood there a long time in a bitter wind.

“She wouldn’t let me in,” she whispered to her brother in the store, when she returned.  She was friendly to him in a shamefaced, evasive sort of way, and she alone of his family.  His father and mother scarcely noticed him.

“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.