It made great trouble and embarrassment, and they were forced to wait until midnight of the following day before they were able to take John Shadwell’s body from the house of Vergie Winters. And when they did take it, it went out of the same door that had opened so many times at the touch of the worn key, and along the shadows of the alley through which he had passed in life so many times. But even then they were not able to keep the affair a secret. The Town came to know it, and so shut out the last glimmer of tolerance for Vergie Winters. It was no longer a half-secret. It was a scandal which cast darkness upon the name of one of the men who had made the Town (as people said with a curious and non-committal tone which might have meant anything at all) “what it was to-day.” The crime was Vergie Winters’s. But she could not have cared very much.... Vergie Winters, sitting there in her terrible solitude behind the lace curtains, while the procession passed her house--first, the band playing “The Dead March from Saul,” and then the cabs containing John Shadwell’s daughter, her husband, and John Shadwell’s grandchildren, and then one by one the cabs carrying the leading citizens. The next morning she came down the steps as she had always done, in the same clothes, with the same air of abysmal indifference. She had not betrayed him during life, and in death she would give no sign; and she must have known that on that morning every eye she passed was turned upon her with a piercing gaze, “to see how she took it.” For twenty years longer, Vergie Winters lived in the narrow wooden house, growing poorer and poorer with the passing years. She saw the children of John Shadwell’s adopted daughter grow into men and women and have children of their own. But the scandal had grown stale now, though the legend persisted, and only a few must have remembered hazily that the old woman who sat behind the curtains was a great-grandmother. Until one morning the howling of the cat roused Rinehart, the German cobbler, who broke into the house and found Vergie Winters dead. And when they carried her down the rickety steps on her last journey she went alone, without a band to play “The Dead March from Saul,” and without a procession of carriages to follow her into that far corner of the cemetery (remote from the fine burial ground of the Shadwells) where they laid her to rest. * * * * *