rcle round the grave while the coffin was being lowered.
Patty alone of all the children felt that mamma was in that coffin, and
that a new and sadder life had begun for papa and herself. She was pale
and trembling, but she clasped his hand more firmly as the coffin went
down, and gave no sob. Fred and Sophy, though they were only two and
three years younger, and though they had seen mamma in her coffin, seemed
to themselves to be looking at some strange show. They had not learned to
decipher that terrible handwriting of human destiny, illness and death.
Dickey had rebelled against his black clothes, until he was told that it
would be naughty to mamma not to put them on, when he at once submitted;
and now, though he had heard Nanny say that mamma was in heaven, he had a
vague notion that she would come home again tomorrow, and say he had been
a good boy and let him empty her work-box. He stood close to his father,
with great rosy cheeks, and wide open blue eyes, looking first up at Mr.
Cleves and then down at the coffin, and thinking he and Chubby would play
at that when they got home.

The burial was over, and Amos turned with his children to re-enter the
house--the house where, an hour ago, Milly's dear body lay, where the
windows were half darkened, and sorrow seemed to have a hallowed precinct
for itself, shut out from the world. But now she was gone; the broad
snow-reflected daylight was in all the rooms; the Vicarage again seemed
part of the common working-day world, and Amos, for the first time, felt
that he was alone--that day after day, month after month, year after
year, would have to be lived through without Milly's love. Spring would
come, and she would not be there; summer, and she would not be there; and
he would never have her again with him by the fireside in the long
evenings. The seasons all seemed irksome to his thoughts; and how dreary
the sunshiny days that would be sure to come! She was gone from him; and
he could never show her his love any more, never make up for omissions in
the past by filling future days with tenderness.

O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the
stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to
their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to
that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest
thing God had given us to know.

Amos Barton had been an affectionate husband, and while Mi