Rebecca's face as she had always known her came up before her.

"I don't believe one word of it," she said again to herself.
But that whisper which had shocked her ear had already begun to be repeated all over the village--by furtive matrons, behind their hands, when the children had been sent out of the room; by girls, blushing beneath each other's eyes as they whispered; by the lounging men in the village store; it was sent like an evil strain through the consciousness of the village, until everybody except Rebecca's own family had heard it.
Barnabas saw little of other people, and nobody dared repeat the whisper to him, and they had too much mercy or too little courage to repeat it to Caleb or Deborah.

Indeed, it is doubtful if any woman in the village, even Hannah Berry, would have ventured to face Deborah Thayer with this rumor concerning her daughter.
Deborah had of late felt anxious about Rebecca, who did not seem like herself.

Her face was strangely changed; all the old meaning had gone out of it, and given place to another, which her mother could not interpret.

Sometimes Rebecca looked like a stranger to her as she moved about the house.