coffin. Rooks cawed in the trees; the bell tolled its cracked note.
The Rev. Charles was crammed down with the soil by the eager spades of
the sexton and his friend, who were cold and wanted a drink.

Maggie, meanwhile, watched the final disappearance of her father with
an ever-growing remorse. Ever since her declaration to her uncle during
their walk yesterday this new picture of her father had grown before
her eyes. She had already forgotten many, many things that might now
have made her resentful or at least critical. She saw him as a figure
most disastrously misunderstood. Without any sentimentality in her
vision she saw him lonely, proud, reserved, longing for her sympathy
which she denied him. His greed for money she saw suddenly as a
determination that his daughter should not be left in want. All those
years he had striven and his apparent harshness, sharpness, unkindness
had been that he might pursue his great object.

She did not cry (some of the villagers curiously watching her thought
her a hard-hearted little thing), but her heart was full of tenderness
as she stood there, seeing the humped grey church that was part of her
life, the green mounds with no name, the dark wood, the grey roofs of
the village clustered below the hill, hearing the bell, the rooks, the
healthy voice of Mr. Trefusis, the bark of some distant dog, the creak
of some distant wheel.

"I missed my chance," she thought. "If only now I could have told him!"

Her aunt stood at her side and once again Maggie felt irritation at her
composure. "After all, he was her brother," she thought. She remembered
the feeling and passion with which her aunt had repeated the
Twenty-third Psalm. She was puzzled.

A moment of shrinking came upon her as she thought of the coming London
life.

Then the service was over. The villagers, with that inevitable
disappointment that always lingers after a funeral, went to their
homes. The children remained until night, under the illusion that it
was Sunday.

Maggie spent the rest of the day, for the most part, alone in her room
and thinking of her father. Her bedroom, an attic with a sloping roof,
contained all her worldly possessions. In part because she had always
been so reserved a child, in part because there had been no one in whom
she might confide even had she wished it, she had always placed an
intensity of feeling around and about the few things that were hers.
Her library was very small, but this di