But in the morning, when Henriette awakened, she found that something terrible had happened to her voice. It was gone; she could not speak. Her grandchildren crowded about her bed, concerned and anxious--an old woman is frail as glass! “You see what we told you, Gran’mammy! You got no call yesterday, getting het up and excited just because old Toni is dead and they want you to sing for his funeral. And didn’t we tell you stay out that ditch? Walking around in water, just like a duck, at your age.” They scolded and fussed and fumed and put warm flannels on her throat. They gave her a toddy. But it did no good. Her throat hurt, and when she opened her mouth she croaked like a frog--she who in her wailing had had as many stops to her voice as a sounding organ.... “Poor Gran’mammy,” her children said. “Now she can’t sing. And Josephine’ll have to go and wail for old Toni’s funeral.” Henriette lay and moaned a little. If she could only cry as children cry, in her disappointment. But the tears wouldn’t come. They had all dried up long ago. At dusk the family returned from the burying. But out of respect for her feelings, as Henriette knew, they forbore to talk of the funeral and of how nice Josephine had sung and “carried on.” They merely said, “Josephine was so fat they had to hold her, to keep her from tumbling down in the grave.” But when she thought no one was looking Henriette took her funeral book from under her pillow and made a crossmark under Josephine’s name. Now they were even. Her old hands shook and one yellow tear rolled out of one eye. “Poor Gran’mamma,” her children said, in whispers. “Poor old Granny....” Sleep did not come to Henriette until nearly daybreak. It began to rain about midnight, a steady rain, long and full of the secrets of autumn. And Henriette lay in her bed and thought about death and dying. She thought about her grandchildren, how good they were. Somehow she always felt sorriest for young people when anyone died. Not for little children, or the very old; but the ones in between. The ones between eighteen and forty, say. They took it hardest. How terrible death was to them, how _everlasting_! If only they could know what _she_ knew, she and the little children.... Of course, she wailed and carried on; that was her business, her calling. But how often, right in the midst of a funeral, even as she stood and gazed in the grave, she had longed to go and whisper to youth’s white, impassioned grief, “There, there, _chère_ ... don’t sorrow so hard. Me, I know. I tell you, I _know_.” But what she knew she could not have said.... Henriette stirred in her bed, sought a new place for her pillow. How often she had longed to say to some bereft mother, she who had buried six, “Do not grieve overmuch, little Mammy. He is not here. See! He is dragging a little tin can for a train, across the white courts of Heaven.”