change. Did the chimney use to be in that corner? No; but his father
had always said it would have drawn better if it had been put there in
the beginning. New shingles within a year: that was evident to a
practised eye. He wondered if anything had been done to the inside of
the building, but he must wait until the morrow to see, for, of course,
the doors would be locked. No; the one at the right side was ajar. He
opened it softly and stepped into the tiny square entry that he recalled
so well--the one through which the Sunday-school children ran out to the
steps from their catechism, apparently enjoying the sunshine after a
spell of orthodoxy; the little entry where the village girls congregated
while waiting for the last bell to ring--they made a 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