Effie and I cowered in our corner between the base burner and the sewing machine; it was terrible to hear them so, quarrelling about God. My mother had her hands to her head as she walked; her figure touched by the firelight, not quite spoiled by childbearing, looked young to me. "Oh! Oh! Oh!" she cried with every step. "You mustn't, Sally; you'll be punished for it----" Cousin Judd shook with excitement; he was bullying her about her Christian submission. I went up to him suddenly and struck him on the arm with my fist. "You let her alone!" I cried. "Let her alone!" Somebody spoke out sharply, I think; a hand plucked me from behind--to my amazement my mother's. "Olivia, Olivia May! I _am_ surprised ... and your father not out of the house yet. Go up to your room and see if you can't learn to control yourself!" After all there was some excuse for Cousin Judd. There was, in the general estimate, something more than fortuitous circumstance that went to my father's taking off. Early in the winter, when work had been stopped on the Zimmern building, there had been a good deal of talk about some local regulations as to the removal of scaffolding and the security of foot passengers. That the contractors had not been brought to book about it was thought to be due to official connivance; my father had written to the paper about it. But the scaffolding had remained until that morning of the high wind, when it came down all together and a bit of the wall with it. That my father should have been passing on his way to the courthouse at the moment, was a leaping together of circumstances that seemed somehow to have raised it to the plane of a moral instance. It provided just that element of the dramatic in human affairs, which somehow wakens the conviction of having always expected it; though it hardly appeared why my father, rather than the contractor or the convincing city official, should have been the victim. If it wasn't an act of Providence, it was so like one that it contributed to bring out to the funeral more people than might otherwise have ventured themselves in such weather.