“Your hands off me. I’ll stay where I am.” She felt herself to be diminished to a point of denial, concentrated to negation, and his grief continued. “Over your grandfather’s dead body, around his deathbed, you wouldn’t kiss your own father. She’s hard, a hard girl....” His tears dwindled to a close, lingering while she, feeling a summons, walked toward the inner door. She stood beside Anthony’s bed listening to his long, slow breathing, each breath fixed into a space of quiet. She opened the window to give him fresh cold air for his labored inhalations. One or two came, friends of Horace, and later Frank came. Theodosia sat by the bed alone, but now and then one of the men from the parlor would come to stay with her for a little. At midnight the night-lamp which Anthony liked to have near at hand burned out and she called Siver to carry it away and renew the oil. When he returned with it rubbed clean and restored, he set it on the table and stood beside the bed, charmed by the enactment there, and presently it appeared that Anthony would not breathe again, that one of the slowly breathed sobs that had quietly shaken his body had been his last breath. They, Theodosia and Siver, stood beside the bed, she making her farewell of the beloved cadaver. Siver found two silver pieces from his pocket and held them in his hand, uncertainly, or he showed them to her, and they seemed for the moment appropriate, as if they gave some sign or made some charm. Then Siver made as if he would lay them across Anthony’s eyelids and she consented. When he had done this she adjusted the coins with her own hands, and thus they closed his eyes. Then she called the men from the parlor. * * * * * After the funeral Horace went to Paducah to attend court. Mr. Reed called on Theodosia, his blank kindly face looking at her from across the parlor while she settled to her chair. He seemed weary of his mission before he had begun, knowing the end from the beginning. Anthony had made a will seven years earlier making her his sole heir. The formality of unfolding papers and citing memoranda was scarcely necessary, for there was nothing left. He might at any moment have forgotten to proceed, to have summed all with a sigh.