There is a subtile blending of the soothing professional tone he uses to lady patients and the gravity befitting a solemn occasion. She takes up her bag, gathers her shawl mechanically into graceful folds over her arms, and follows him. They go up through the wood, past the poor-house, to a side entrance. She notices as she looks down over the town that the flags are all half-way down the staffs, and that the village is crowded with folk; and that outside the house there are groups of black-coated men, like ants crawling about a white stone, she thinks. The little housekeeper meets her at the door; the other girls are crying. She bows to people without recognizing them. Then there is a tramping of feet, and some one leads her out; the bell is tolling up from the church, and she sees that they have covered the gray cobs with black palls, and attached a black canopy to the cart, and outlined the spokes of the wheels with fir needles, and smothered the rest of it with branches and flowers, wreaths and crosses, and harps and lyres: he hated music too! The coffin--what an ugly black thing, with an exaggerated stomach and garished silver ornaments!--is resting upon the Union Jack. A crowd of faces that she does not know meets her. She places herself behind the cart, and the maids follow her, and all the dogs gather round her, but never growl once as they move on; and the crowd follows. She can see the green road; they have covered it according to custom with branches of fir and pine,--a green river, a grass-green river, winding to the left. And the sea, the sea he loved,--it seems to her that there is a cadence of pity in the eternal note of its quiet sadness. How tired her feet are! It's quite half a mile yet. She has no ankles, how funny! Just stilts made of her will. She trips. The cow-girl pushes past the housekeeper, and watches her steps. "Lord God, how stony-faced she is!" whispers the doctor's wife, "and she never cried once."