enched
open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow
and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: "My boy, my boy! And this
is how you've come home to me!"

As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of
unutterable repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and angular,
dressed entirely in black, darted out of the house and caught Mrs.
Merrick by the shoulders, crying sharply: "Come, come, Mother; you
mustn't go on like this!" Her tone changed to one of obsequious
solemnity as she turned to the banker: "The parlor is ready, Mr.
Phelps."

The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the
undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into a large,
unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish,
and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass
prisms and before a "Rogers group" of John Alden and Priscilla,
wreathed with smilax. Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickening
conviction that there had been some horrible mistake, and that he had
somehow arrived at the wrong destination. He looked painfully about
over the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery, among the
hand-painted china plaques and panels, and vases, for some mark of
identification, for something that might once conceivably have belonged
to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he recognized his friend in the
crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls hanging above the
piano that he felt willing to let any of these people approach the
coffin.

"Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face," wailed
the elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully,
almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen under its masses
of strong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then,
almost incredulously, looked again. There was a kind of power about
her face--a kind of brutal handsomeness, even, but it was scarred and
furrowed by violence, and so colored and coarsened by fiercer passions
that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long
nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines
on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her
forehead; her teeth were large and square and set far apart--teeth that
could tear. She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed
about like twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himse