toil-hardened
hands at their eyes; the men, standing in the grass, shuffled their feet
uneasily. "Let us pray," the speaker dropped upon his knees, and his voice
rose, grew more insistent, shrill with a touch of hysteria. From the back
of the house a hen clucked in an excited, aggravated manner.

Gordon Makimmon stood at the end of the porch, morosely ill at ease: the
memories of Clare as a girl, as a woman going about and performing the
duties of their home, the dignity of his sense of loss and sorrow, had
vanished before this public ceremony; they had sunk to perfunctory,
conventional emotions before the glib flood of the paid eulogist, the
facile emotion of the women.

Suddenly he saw, partially hidden by the dull dresses of the older women,
a white, ruffled skirt, the turn of a young shoulder, a drooping straw
hat. A meager, intervening form moved, and he saw that Lettice Hollidew
had come to his sister's funeral. He wondered, in a momentary, instinctive
resentment, what had brought her among this largely negligent gathering.
She had barely known Clare; Gordon was not certain that she had ever been
in their house. He could see her plainly now--she stood clasping white
gloves with firm, pink hands; her gaze was lowered upon the uneven
flooring of the porch. He could see the soft contour of her chin, a
shimmer of warm, brown hair. She was crisply fresh, incredibly young in
the group of gaunt, worn forms; her ruffled fairness was an affront to the
thin, rigid shoulders in rusty black, the sallow, deeply-bitten faces of
the other women.

She looked up, and surprised his intent gaze: she flushed slightly, the
gloves were twisted into a knot, but her eyes were unwavering--they held
an appeal to his understanding, his sympathy, not to be mistaken. It was
evident that that gaze cost her an effort. She was, Gordon remembered, a
diffident girl. His resentment evaporated.... He speculated upon her
reason for coming; and, speculating, involuntarily stood more erect. With
a swift, surreptitious motion he straightened his necktie.

The Greenstream cemetery lay aslant on a rise above the village. From the
side of the raw, yellow clay hole into which they lowered the coffin
Gordon could see, beyond the black form of the minister, over the rows of
uneven roofs, the bulk of the Courthouse, the sweep of the valley, glowing
with multifarious vitality.

"Dust to dust," said the minister; "ashes to ashes," in the midst of the
warm,