soft blur of pink
and blue and buff, a little flutter of curls and braids and fans and
sunshades, in his mind's eye, as he closed the outer door behind him and
gently opened the inner one. The church was flooded with moonlight and
snowlight, and there was one lamp burning at the back of the pulpit; a
candle, too, on the pulpit steps. There was the tip-tap-tip of a tack-
hammer going on in a distant corner. Was somebody hanging Christmas
garlands? The new red carpet attracted his notice, and as he grew
accustomed to the dim light, it carried his eye along the aisle he had
trod so many years of Sundays, to the old familiar pew. The sound of the
hammer ceased and a woman rose from her knees. A stranger was doing for
the family honour what he ought himself to have done. The woman turned
to shake her skirt, and it was Nancy Wentworth. 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. "Sweet records, and promises
as sweet," had always met in Nancy's face, and either he had forgotten
how pretty she was, or else she had absolutely grown prettier during his
absence.

Nancy would have chosen the supreme moment of meeting very differently,
but she might well have chosen worse. She unpinned her skirt and brushed
the threads off, smoothed the pew cushions carefully, and took a last
stitch in the ragged hassock. She then lifted the Bible and the hymn-
book from the rack, and putting down a bit of flannel on the pulpit
steps, took a flatiron from an oil-stove, and opening the ancient books,
pressed out the well-thumbed leaves one by one with infinite care. After
replacing the volumes in their accustomed place, she first extinguished
the flame of her stove, which she tucked out of sight, and then blew out
the lamp and t