He might have known it.
Women were always faithful; they always remembered old landmarks, old days, old friends, old duties.

His father and mother and Esther were all gone; who but dear Nancy would have made the old Peabody pew right and tidy for the Christmas festival?
Bless her kind womanly heart! She looked just the same to him as when he last saw her.

Mercifully he seemed to have held in remembrance all these years not so much her youthful bloom as her general qualities of mind and heart: her cheeriness, her spirit, her unflagging zeal, her bright womanliness.

Her grey dress was turned up in front over a crimson moreen petticoat.

She had on a cosy jacket, a fur turban of some sort with a redbreast in it, and her cheeks were flushed from exertion.