"Oh, it's a funeral procession!" whispered Mary, pushing back a little further into the shadow of the vines, so as to be out of sight. "It must be that Mr. Locksley who was killed yesterday over at Hemlock Ridge by a falling tree. Isn't it awful?" She gave a little shiver and her eyes filled with tears as they rested on the children in the second wagon. There had been a pitiful attempt to honor the dead by following the conventions. The woman who sat bowed over on the front seat like an image of despair, wore a black veil and cotton gloves; and black sunbonnets, evidently borrowed from grown-up neighbors, covered the flaxen hair of three little girls in pink calico dresses, who nestled against her. There was a band of rusty crape fastened around the gray cow-boy hat that the boy wore. The pathetic little procession wound on past the house and up the hill, then was lost to sight as it passed into a grove of cedars on the right, behind which lay the lonely cemetery. Only a few times in her life had Mary come this close to death. Now the horror of it seemed to blot out all the brightness of the sweet May day, and the thought of the grief-stricken woman in the wagon cast such a shadow over her that her eyes were full of unshed tears and her hands trembled when she took up her needle again. "It's so awful!" she exclaimed, when they had passed out of hearing. "They were all over at that dinner at Hemlock Ridge that Pink took me to last winter. I remember Mr. Locksley especially because he was so big and strong-looking, like a young giant, almost. I asked Pink who he was, because I noticed how good he was to his family, carrying the baby around on one arm and helping his wife unpack baskets with the other. Yesterday morning when he left the house he was just as well and strong as anybody in the world, Captain Doane told me. He went off laughing and joking, and stopped to call back something to his wife about the garden, and two hours later they carried him home--like that! In just an instant the life had been crushed out of him." Her voice broke and she swallowed hard before she could go on. "I've always thought death wouldn't be so bad if one could die as dear Beth did, in 'Little Women.' Don't you remember how sweetly and gently she faded away, and so slowly that there was no great shock when the end came? She had time to get used to the idea of going, and to say things that would comfort them after she was gone. But to be snatched away like Mr. Locksley--without a moment's warning--it seems too dreadful! I don't see how God can let such cruel things happen." "But think, little daughter," urged Mrs. Ware gently, "how much he was spared. No long illness, no racking pain, no lingering with the consciousness that he was a burden to others! There is nothing cruel in that. It's a happy way for the one who goes, dear, to go suddenly. It is the way of all others I would choose for myself."