Gesture and voice and frowning vigor of mien were all so imperative and rough that they seemed to bewilder Serena. She, too, had turned now, so that I could see her wan and delicate face, framed in the laced festoons of black, like the fabulous countenance of “The Lady Iñez” in my mother’s “Album of Beauty.” She bent her brows in hurried thought, and began stammering, “Well, he said--Let’s see--he said--” “Oh, yes!” broke in Aunt Em, with raucous irony, “I know well enough what he said! He said I was a good worker--that they’d never had to have a hired girl since I was big enough to wag a churn dash, an’ they wouldn’t known what to do without me. I know all that; I’ve heard it on an’ off for twenty years. What I’d like to hear is, did he tell you that he went down South to bring back _your_ husband, an’ that he never so much as give a thought to fetchin’ _my_ husband, who was just as good a soldier and died just as bravely as yours did? I’d like to know--did he tell you that?” What could Serena do but shake her head, and bow it in silence before this bitter gale of words? “An’ tell me this, too,” Aunt Em went on, lifting her harsh voice mercilessly, “when you was settin’ there in church this forenoon, with the soldiers out, an’ the bells tollin’ an’ all that--did he say, ‘This is some for Alvy, an’ some for Abel, who went to the war together, an’ was killed together, or within a month o’ one another?’ Did he say that, or look for one solitary minute as if he thought it? I’ll bet he didn’t!” Serena’s head sank lower still, and she put up, in a blinded sort of a way, a little white handkerchief to her eyes. “But why blame _me?_” she asked.