" he stammered, "you don't think--you
know, it's all for _her_--and they say she can't live anyway. I had
never thought of such a thing before. I was wondering how I could
make it comfortable for Evelina here."

But his father did not seem to listen. "Countin' on that!" he
repeated. "Countin' on a poor old soul, that 'ain't ever had anything
to set her heart on but a few posies, dyin' to make room for other
folks to have what she's been cheated out on. Countin' on that!" The
old man's voice broke into a hoarse sob; he got up, and went
hurriedly out of the room.

"Why, father!" his son called after him, in alarm. He got up to
follow him, but his father waved him back and shut the door hard.

"Father must be getting childish," Thomas thought, wonderingly. He
did not bring up the subject to him again.

Evelina Adams died in March. One morning the bell tolled seventy long
melancholy tones before people had eaten their breakfasts. They ran
to their doors and counted. "It's her," they said, nodding, when they
had waited a little after the seventieth stroke. Directly Mrs. Martha
Loomis and her two girls were seen hustling importantly down the
road, with their shawls over their heads, to the Squire's house.
"Mis' Loomis can lay her out," they said. "It ain't likely that young
Evelina knows anything about such things. Guess she'll be thankful
she's got somebody to call on now, if she 'ain't mixed much with the
Loomises." Then they wondered when the funeral would be, and the
women furbished up their black gowns and bonnets, and even in a few
cases drove to the next town and borrowed from relatives; but there
was a great disappointment in store for them.

Evelina Adams died on a Saturday. The next day it was announced from
the pulpit that the funeral would be private, by the particular
request of the deceased. Evelina Adams had carried her delicate
seclusion beyond death, to the very borders of the grave. Nobody,
outside the family, was bidden to the funeral, except the doctor, the
minister, and the two deacons of the church. They were to be the
bearers. The burial also was to be private, in the Squire's family
burial-lot, at the north of the house. The bearers would carry the
coffin across the yard, and there would not only be no funeral, but
no funeral procession, and no hearse. "It don't seem scarcely
decent," the women whispered to each other; "and more than all that,
she ain't goin' to be _seen_." The deacons' wives