“They say her lungs filled right up.... Seems she’d had bronchial troubles before.... I always said both them girls was frail.... Look at Ora, how she took and wasted away! And it’s colder’n all outdoors up there to Brand’s.... Their mother, too, _she_ pined away just the same. They don’t ever make old bones on the mother’s side of the family.... There’s that young Bedlow over there; they say Venny was engaged to him.... Oh, Mrs. Rutledge, excuse _me_.... Step right into the pew; there’s a seat for you alongside of grandma....” Mrs. Rutledge was advancing with deliberate step down the narrow aisle of the bleak wooden church. She had on her best bonnet, a monumental structure which no one had seen out of her trunk since old Mrs. Silsee’s funeral, three years before. All the women remembered it. Under its perpendicular pile her narrow face, swaying on the long thin neck, seemed whiter than ever; but her air of fretfulness had been composed into a suitable expression of mournful immobility. “Looks as if the stone-mason had carved her to put atop of Venny’s grave,” Bosworth thought as she glided past him; and then shivered at his own sepulchral fancy. When she bent over her hymn book her lowered lids reminded him again of marble eye-balls; the bony hands clasping the book were bloodless. Bosworth had never seen such hands since he had seen old Aunt Cressidora Cheney strangle the canary-bird because it fluttered. The service was over, the coffin of Venny Brand had been lowered into her sister’s grave, and the neighbours were slowly dispersing. Bosworth, as pall-bearer, felt obliged to linger and say a word to the stricken father. He waited till Brand had turned from the grave with the Deacon at his side. The three men stood together for a moment; but not one of them spoke. Brand’s face was the closed door of a vault, barred with wrinkles like bands of iron. Finally the Deacon took his hand and said: “The Lord gave—” Brand nodded and turned away toward the shed where the horses were hitched. Bosworth followed him. “Let me drive along home with you,” he suggested. Brand did not so much as turn his head. “Home? What home?” he said; and the other fell back. Loretta Bosworth was talking with the other women while the men unblanketed their horses and backed the cutters out into the heavy snow. As Bosworth waited for her, a few feet off, he saw Mrs. Rutledge’s tall bonnet lording it above the group. Andy Pond, the Rutledge farm-hand, was backing out the sleigh. “Saul ain’t here today, Mrs. Rutledge, is he?” one of the village elders piped, turning a benevolent old tortoise-head about on a loose neck, and blinking up into Mrs. Rutledge’s marble face.