Chapter 41

The unobtrusive funeral cortége had turned the corner of Bank Street and disappeared from view almost an hour ago. In the front room of the house in which had lived the man just carried to his grave, the gentle old woman who had been his mother sat and looked with pathetic patience at Miss Amory Starkweather as the rough winds of the New England early spring rushed up the empty thoroughfare and whirled through the yet unleafed trees. Miss Amory had remained after the other people had gone away, and she was listening to the wind, too.

"We are both old women," she had said. "We have both lived long enough to have passed through afternoons like this more than once before. Howsoever bad other hours may be, it seems to me that these are always the worst."

"Just after--everything--has been taken away," Mrs. Latimer said now; "the house seems so empty. Faith," tremulously, "even Faith can't help you not to feel that everything has gone--such a long, long way off."

She did not wipe away the tear that fell on her cheek. She looked very small and meek in her deep mourning. She presented to Miss Amory's imagination the figure of a lovable child grown old without having lost its child temperament.

"But I must not complain," she went on, with an effort to smile at Miss Amory's ugly old intelligently sympathetic countenance. "It must have been all over in a second, and he could have felt no pain at all. Death by accident is always an awful shock to those left behind; but it must scarcely be like death to--those who go. He was quite well; he had just bought the pistol and took it out to show to Mr. Baird. Mr. Baird himself did not understand how it happened."

"It is nearly always so--that no one quite sees how it is done," Miss Amory answered. "Do not let yourself think of it."

She was sitting quite near to Mrs. Latimer, and she leaned forward and put her hand over the cold, little, shrivelled one lying on the lap of the mourning-dress.

"Though it was so sudden," she said, "it was an end not unlike Margery's--the slipping out of life without realising that the last hour had come."

"Yes; I have thought that, too."

She looked up at the portrait on the wall--the portrait of the bright girl-face. Her own face lighted into a smile.

"It is so strange to think that they are together again," she said. "They will have so much to tell each other."

"Yes," said Miss Amory; "yes."

She got up herself and went and stood before the picture. Mrs. Latimer rose and came and stood beside her.

"Mr. Baird has been with me every day," she said. "He has been like a son to me."

A carriage drew up before the house, and, as the occupant got out, both