She thought of it all the time she was eating more hot corn-bread and sorghum at dinner--the thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said to each other; the thing which seemed so new, so strange, so _loud and awful_, like the hellfire things Baptist ministers talked about. Then, after supper, she fell asleep in the pineapple bed, still thinking of it; and all the next day, still playing funeral by the paling fence, she thought of it again. And that night, when once more she lay in the pineapple bed, there it was again, the strange loud thing Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham had said to each other--said in a soft, _crying_ way. All at once she had a waked-up feeling; she sat bolt upright in bed and thought, "Comp'ny." There were voices coming across the passageway from the parlor. A light streamed, too; and when she stood faintly bathed in its glow, she saw that Mrs. Preston was there--Mrs. Preston, in the deep mourning she had vowed never to put off as long as her beloved State lay with her head in the dust. But something in her lap brightened it now, this shabby, soldier-widow black: a slim cross, divine with green and white, as daintily delicate, with its tremulous myrtle stars, as had been the lady things in Miss Sally and Miss Polly Graham's store. Mrs. Preston was saying that she was going to send it "anonymously." Then she asked Ma if she knew that _he_ had had to attend to all the arrangements himself. "Even the dress," went on Mrs. Preston, crying a little; and Uncle John coughed in the deep, growly way gentlemen always cough when they are ashamed to cry themselves. Then they all began talking about funerals, saying to each other they would like to go, but how _could_ they? Uncle John saying at last, with more of the growly, coughy way, that no, no, they "couldn't flout him." It would be more cruel, far, far more cruel, said Uncle John, than to stay away. Besides,--didn't the ladies know?--it was private. "Though," the speaker went on, his worn, somber face lighting up with something like a gleam of comfort, "I reckon that was to keep those other white hounds away as well as the rest of us." Ma nodded. They weren't gentlemen-born, as he was, she sighed--"born to Southern best." And then, with a "Poor wretch--poor, proud, degraded wretch!" she handed out the thing she had been making--a white rosette as beautiful as any rose--and told Mrs. Preston to put it "there," touching the myrtle cross with fingers kissing-soft. But Mrs. Preston only said back, "He's refused even the minister!" and seemed more unhappy, oh, mighty unhappy. Hope Carolina gasped with the wonderment of it all. How funny it seemed, how dreadfully funny, that everybody had forgotten everything just because a child had gone up into the sky: Uncle John the bullet, and Mrs. Preston the lost paradise next door, and Ma the barbecue speeches that made niggers vote any which way--all, all that Radicals had ever done to them!