re Abrahama White was laid in state, all the shameful joy
passed from their faces. The old woman in her last bed was majestic.
The dead face was grand, compelling to other than earthly
considerations. Henry and Sylvia forgot the dead woman's little store
which she had left behind her. Sylvia leaned over her and wept;
Henry's face worked. Nobody except himself had ever known it, but he,
although much younger, had had his dreams about the beautiful
Abrahama White. He remembered them as he looked at her, old and dead
and majestic, with something like the light of her lost beauty in her
still face. It was like a rose which has fallen in such a windless
atmosphere that its petals retain the places which they have held
around its heart.

Henry loved his wife, but this before him was associated with
something beyond love, which tended to increase rather than diminish
it. When at last they left the room he did what was very unusual with
him. He was reticent, like the ordinary middle-aged New-Englander. He
took his wife's little, thin, veinous hand and clasped it tenderly.
Her bony fingers clung gratefully to his.

When they were all out in the south room Flora Barnes spoke again. "I
have never seen a more beautiful corpse," said she, in exactly the
same voice which she had used before. She began taking off her large,
white apron. Something peculiar in her motion arrested Sylvia's
attention. She made a wiry spring at her.

"Let me see that apron," said she, in a voice which corresponded with
her action.

Flora recoiled. She turned pale, then she flushed. "What for?"

"Because I want to."

"It's just my apron. I--"

But Sylvia had the apron. Out of its folds dropped a thin roll of
black silk. Flora stood before Sylvia. Beads of sweat showed on her
flat forehead. She twitched like one about to have convulsions. She
was very tall, but Sylvia seemed to fairly loom over her. She held
the black silk out stiffly, like a bayonet.

"What is this?" she demanded, in her tense voice.

Flora twitched.

"What is it? I want to know."

"The back breadth," replied Flora in a small, scared voice, like the
squeak of a mouse.

"Whose back breadth?"

"Her back breadth."

"_Her_ back breadth?"

"Yes."

"Robbing the dead!" said Sylvia, pitilessly. Her tense voice was
terrible.

Flora tried to make a stand. "She hadn't any use for it," she
squeaked, plaintively.

"Robbing the dead! Its bad enough to rob the living."

"She c