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.
Although Deborah never asked a question, and although people were shy of alluding to Rebecca, she yet seemed to know, in some occult and instinctive fashion, all about her.
When a funeral procession passed the Thayer house one afternoon Deborah knew quite well whose little coffin was in the hearse, although she could scarcely have said that anybody had told her.
Caleb came to her after dinner, with a strange, defiant air.