A number of heads had been thrust from neighboring windows while the body was being borne away. Claire, who endured what was thus far the supreme humiliation of her life, wondered whether any one was watching now, but she kept her eyes drooped toward the pavement as she moved along, and never once looked to left or right. She despised these possible watchers, and yet she remembered what her dead had been--how kindly, how pure, how noble; and it was to her sense an infamy that his ignominious burial should be made a theme of vulgar gossip. "He is to be put in Potter's Field," she told her own aching, bursting heart, while she still hurried along. "Yes, _he_! And he was so good, so fine, so much a gentleman! He is to be put in Potter's Field!... But I will see the last sod placed over him.... That man _will_ keep his word.... I shall stand by poor Father, his only mourner. He will be glad if he knows. What a slight thing it is to do for him, after all the love he gave me! But it is all I _can_ do. All, and yet so little!" A dreary ride in the cars at last brought her to Flatbush. After alighting she had quite a long walk through the gray, foggy atmosphere of a region which the sweetest mood of spring or summer finds no spell to beautify. It was now as hideous and lonesome as that hateful tract just beyond Greenpoint. The immense gloomy structures of the almshouses loomed beside the path she took. The conductor on the car had told her just how to reach the pauper graveyard. It lay at some distance from the grim buildings that she was obliged to pass, and within whose walls were prisoned the sin, the sickness and the madness of a great city. Nothing could be more common, more neglectful, more wretchedly melancholy, than the place she at length gained. It was scarcely an acre in extent; it did not contain a single tree or shrub; it was enclosed by a fence of coarse, careless boarding. Its graves were so thick that you could scarcely pass between them. In each grave had been laid four bodies, and excepting a pathetic half-dozen or so of simple wooden crosses, there were no signs to tell who slept here, except rough, low stakes, each bearing four numbers. Never was the oblivion of death more sternly typified; never was its dark mockery more dolefully accentuated! A little group of men stood near an open grave as Claire reached the gate. She saw them, and recognized one of them, who advanced toward her. She felt herself grow slightly faint as she perceived a box placed just at the rim of the earthy cavity. "Was I in time?" she asked of the man, as they walked together inside the enclosure. "Yes," he said, with a very kind voice. "You was just in time, Miss. All the others is turned in except him. I saved him on purpose." VIII.