She was a quiet, inoffensive, unsuspicious, personage, believing wholly in Governor Markham and everything pertaining to him.

She was canning fruit when Hannah came with the message that some of the governor's kin had come from the East, and remembering to have heard that Richard once had an uncle somewhere in Massachusetts, she had no doubt that this was a daughter of the old gentleman and a cousin of Richard's, especially as Hannah described the stranger as youngish and tolerably good-looking.
She had no thought that it was the runaway wife, of whom she knew more than Hannah, else she would surely have dropped the Spencer jar she was filling and burned her fingers worse than she did, trying to crowd in the refractory cover, which persisted in tipping up sideways and all ways but the right way.
"Some of his kin.

Pity they are gone.

What shall we do with her ?" she said, as she finally pushed the cover to its place and blew the thumb she had burned badly.
"Maybe she don't mean to stay long; she didn't bring no baggage," Hannah said, and thus reassured, Mrs.Dobson rolled down her sleeves and tying on a clean apron, started for the reception-room, where Ethie sat like one stupefied, or one who walks in a dream from which he tries in vain to waken.
This house, as far as she could judge, was not like that home on the prairie where her first married days were spent.

Everything here was luxurious and grand and in such perfect taste.