s. Susan Hobbs, the present one, and by Mr. Howes,
the Sunday school superintendent--she was thinking most of herself, Mary
Augusta Lathrop, who was going to a funeral that very afternoon and,
after that, no one seemed to know exactly where.

It was a beautiful April day and the doors of the carriage house and
the big door of the barn were wide open. Mary-'Gusta could hear the hens
clucking and the voices of people talking. The voices were two: one was
that of Mrs. Hobbs, the housekeeper, and the other belonged to Mr. Abner
Hallett, the undertaker. Mary-'Gusta did not like Mr. Hallett's voice;
she liked neither it nor its owner's manner; she described both voice
and manner to herself as "too soothy." They gave her the shivers.

Mr. Hallett's tone was subdued at the present time, but a trifle of the
professional "soothiness" was lacking. He and Mrs. Hobbs were conversing
briskly enough and, although Mary-'Gusta could catch only a word or two
at intervals, she was perfectly sure they were talking about her. She
was certain that if she were to appear at that moment in the door of the
barn they would stop talking immediately and look at her. Everybody whom
she had met during the past two days looked at her in that queer way. It
made her feel as if she had something catching, like the measles, and as
if, somehow or other, she was to blame.

She realized dimly that she should feel very, very badly because her
stepfather was dead. Mrs. Hobbs had told her that she should and seemed
to regard her as queerer than ever because she had not cried. But,
according to the housekeeper, Captain Hall was out of his troubles and
had gone where he would be happy for ever and ever. So it seemed to her
strange to be expected to cry on his account. He had not been happy
here in Ostable, or, at least, he had not shown his happiness in the way
other people showed theirs. To her he had been a big, bearded giant of
a man, whom she saw at infrequent intervals during the day and always
at night just before she went to bed. His room, with the old-fashioned
secretary against the wall, and the stuffed gull on the shelf, and the
books in the cupboard, and the polished narwhal horn in the corner, was
to her a sort of holy of holies, a place where she was led each evening
at nine o'clock, at first by Mrs. Bailey and, later, by Mrs. Hobbs,
to shake the hand of the big man who looked at her absently over his
spectacles and said good night in a voice not un