On this last Sunday, when she should perform her weekly duty of placing flowers upon the altar, Linda clipped her choicest white chrysanthemums from the bushes and early in the day took them to the church, making her way through dankly green paths overgrown with woodbine, that she might reach the enclosure where dead and gone Talbots of many generations were buried. Upon a newly-sodded grave she laid her fairest blossoms, and stood for a moment with heaving breast and quivering lips, then she went on to the church, pushing open the creaking door which led into the still, dimly-lighted, musty-smelling place. "There must be more air and sun," she said, setting wide the door and forcing open a window that the sunlight might pour in. Then she busied herself with placing the flowers in their vases. This done, she sat down in the old family pew, her thoughts travelling back to the days when it had been scarce large enough for them all, father, mother, grandmother, two brothers, three sisters, and now all resting in the quiet churchyard, herself the youngest of them all, the only one left. She ran her hand lovingly along the corner of the pew where her mother had been wont to sit; she touched with her lips the spot where Martin's forehead had so often rested as he knelt by her side. Next she knelt, herself, for a few minutes; then, without looking back, she left the church, to return later to the one service of the day, letting Grace and Lauretta follow. Even sorrow possessed certain elements of satisfaction to Grace when she was made a conspicuous object of sympathy. She could not have mourned in silence, if she had tried, and the gratification of hearing someone say as she passed: "Poor, dear Mrs. Talbot, how pathetic she looks," was true balm to her grief. She always went regularly to church, swept in late in all her swathing of crape, to take her place in the Talbot pew, and as certain suggestive looks were cast her, she returned them with a plaintive droop of the eye, and a mournful turn of the head, as if she would say: "Yes, here I am in all my woe. Pity me who will, and I shall be grateful." Linda, on the contrary, stole into a back seat just before the service began and stole out again as soon as it was over. She could not yet face sympathy and commiseration.