u'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 parlour 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 a mistake, and that he had somehow arrived
at the wrong destination. He looked at the clover-green Brussels, the fat
plush upholstery, among the hand-painted china placques 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 coloured 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 himself being drawn into
the whirlpool.

The daughter--the tall, raw-boned woman in crepe, with a mourning comb in
her hair which curiously lengthened her long face--sat stiffly upon the