her breast, her feet pattering over the
little stones of the road.... The wind whistled down over the graves, by
the wooden crosses.... There was that little woman who at the close of
the day, when the light was charitable in its obscurity, opened her door
and came down from the threshold of her house, painfully as if she were
descending from a great height. Nobody was about. All was quietness in
the quiet street. And she drew the door to, put the key in the lock, her
hand trembled, the lock clicked! The deed was done! Who but herself
could know that the click of the key in the lock was the end, the close,
the dreadful culmination of the best part of a whole century of
struggle, of life? Behind that door she had swept up a bundle of
memories that were now all an agony because the key had clicked in the
lock. Behind the door was the story of her life and the lives of her
children and her children's children. Where was the use, she might have
asked, of blaming any of them now? What was it that they had all gone,
all scattered, leaving her broken there at the last? Had not the key
clicked in the lock? In that click was the end of it all; in the empty
house were the ghosts of her girlhood, her womanhood, her motherhood,
her old age, her struggles, her successes, her skill in running her
little shop, her courage in riding one family squall after another! The
key had clicked in the lock. She moved down the quiet street, sensitive
lest the eye of the neighbours should see her, a tottering, broken thing
going by the vague walls, keeping to the back streets, setting out for
the dark house beyond the town. She had said to them, "I will be no
trouble to you." And, indeed, she was not. They had little more to do
for her than join her hands over her breast.... The wind was plaintive
in the gaunt trees of the dark wood.... Which of us could say he would
never turn a key in the lock of an empty house? How many casual little
twists of the wrist of Fate stand between the best of us and the step
down from the threshold of a broken home? What rags of memories have any
of us to bundle behind the door of the empty house when the hour comes
for us to click the key in the lock?... The wind cried down the narrow
strip of ground where the smell of decay was in the grass.

There was a movement beside the white coffin, the men were lifting it
off the golden pile of earth and lowering it into the dark pit. The
men's feet slipped and shuffled for a