sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their large knuckles, folded in her lap,
her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly awaiting the opening of the
coffin. Near the door stood a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in the
house, with a timid bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and
gentle. She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted
to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob. Steavens
walked over and stood beside her.

Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail,
odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept grey hair and a dingy beard,
tobacco stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly. He went slowly up
to the coffin and stood rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between his
hands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief that
he had no consciousness of anything else.

"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so," he quavered timidly,
putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow. She turned
and sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he tottered a little.
He did not even glance toward the coffin, but continued to look at her
with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the
whip. His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable shame.
When his wife rushed from the room, her daughter strode after her with
set lips. The servant stole up to the coffin, bent over it for a moment,
and then slipped away to the kitchen, leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and
the father to themselves. The old man stood looking down at his dead
son's face. The sculptor's splendid head seemed even more noble in its
rigid stillness than in life. The dark hair had crept down upon the wide
forehead; the face seemed strangely long, but in it there was not that
repose we expect to find in the faces of the dead. The brows were so
drawn that there were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the chin
was thrust forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life had
been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once relax the tension
and smooth the countenance into perfect peace--as though he were still
guarding something precious, which might even yet be wrested from him.

The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to the
lawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are comin' back to set
up with Harve, ain't they?" he asked. "Thank'ee, Jim, thank'ee." He
brushed the hair back gently