After Deborah Thayer had shut the door, the young girl sitting beside it arose.

"I didn't know she was in here, or I wouldn't have come in," she said, nervously.
"That don't make any odds," replied Mrs.Barnard, who was trembling all over, and had sunk helplessly into a rocking-chair, which she swayed violently and unconsciously.
Cephas opened the door of the brick oven, and put in a batch of his pies, and the click of the iron latch made her start as if it were a pistol-shot.
Charlotte got up and went out of the room with a backward glance and a slight beckoning motion of her head, and the girl slunk after her so secretly that it seemed as if she did not see herself.

Cephas looked sharply after them, but said nothing; he was like a philosopher in such a fury of research and experiment that for the time he heeded thoroughly nothing else.
The young girl, who was Rose Berry, Charlotte's cousin, followed her panting up the steep stairs to her chamber.

She was a slender little creature, and was now overwrought with nervous excitement.

She fairly gasped for breath when she sat down in the little wooden chair in Charlotte's room.