e muslin over
Mercy's brown hair, which even now, in her fiftieth year, showed only here
and there a silver thread. They laid fine plaits of the same stiff white
muslin over her breast, and crossed her hands above them.

"She must ha' been a handsome woman in her time, Mis' Bunker. I 'spect
she was married, don't you?" said Ann Sweetser, Mrs. Bunker's spinster
cousin, who always helped her on these occasions.

"Well, this ere ring looks like it," replied Mrs. Bunker, taking up a bit
of the muslin and rubbing the broad gold band on the third finger of
Mercy's left hand. "But yer can't allers tell by that nowadays. There's
folks wears 'em that ain't married. This is a real harndsome ring, 's
heavy 's ever I see."

How Mercy's heart must have been touched, and also her fine and pathetic
sense of humor, if her freed spirit hovered still in that little
low-roofed room! This cast-off garment of hers, so carefully honored, so
curiously considered and speculated upon by these simple-minded people!
There was something rarely dramatic in all the surroundings of these last
hours. Among the guests in the house was one, a woman, herself a poet, who
toward the end of the second day came into the chamber, bringing long
trailing vines of the sweet Linnea, which was then in full bloom. Her
poet's heart was moved to the depths by the thought of this unknown, dead
woman lying there, tended by strangers' hands. She gazed with an
inexplicable feeling of affection upon Mercy's placid brow. She lifted the
lifeless hands and laid them down again in a less constrained position.
She, too, noted the broad gold ring, and said,--

"She has been loved then. I wonder if he is alive!" The door was closed,
and no one was in the room. With a strange impulse she could not account
for to herself, she said, "I will kiss her for him," and bent and kissed
the cold forehead. Then she laid the fragrant vines around the face and
across the bosom, and went away, feeling an inexplicable sense of nearness
to the woman she had kissed. When the next morning she knew that it was
Mercy Philbrick, the poet, in whose lifeless presence she had stood, she
exclaimed with a burst of tears, "Oh, I might have known that there was
some subtile bond which made me kiss her! I have always loved her verses
so."

On the day after Lizzy Hunter returned from Mercy's funeral, Stephen White
called at her house and asked to speak to her. She had almost forgotten
his existence, thou