"No, Mr. Axtell, it is not as I will; it is very much as I will not. I can go in there, and look at the face you wish; but it will unfit me for the duties of life for days to come. The face that I see there will tenant this house forever, and not this only,--it will be seen wherever I go." "Can you not overcome it?" "Oh, yes." "Why not, then?" "It takes such sweet revenge that my overcoming is the sorriest kind of victory." "It _is_ strange," he said. "What, Sir?" "I beg your pardon; I was thinking in words," he replied. "I am sorry that I cannot do as you wish," I said, and resumed my profession in the room above. The day went on, never pausing one moment for the sorrow and the suffering that another day had brought to this house in Redleaf. Just before the funeral-bell began to toll, Mr. Axtell came again to the sickroom door. There was no change. I told him so. Why did the man look as if he had been crying? Was it because he had, I wonder? He did not come in. Poor man! He was the only relative, the only one to stand at the last beside the grave he opened yesterday. I could not help it, I held out my hand to him as he stood there in the hall, I had no words wherewith to convey sympathy. He looked at it very much as he might have done at one of the waxen hands that belong to waxen figures in a shop-window, without one ray of the meaning it was intended to convey entering into his mind. I felt confused, uncomfortable. It seemed to me, then, irreverent to his sorrow, that I, a stranger, should have attempted the proffer of sympathy; but I must make him comprehend me. "I wanted to say that I am sorry with you," I said. "Will you say it the same way again?" "How?" for this time it was I who did not comprehend. He held out his hand. I fulfilled my original intention. "I thank you," he said, and went down alone to his mother's funeral. How do people ever live through funerals? The solemn tolling of the bell went on. The village-people came, one by one. Aaron's voice it was that was heard in the burial-service that came sounding in to me, sitting close beside the bed whereon the sick one lay. There seemed a comfort in getting near to her. At last--what a cycle of thought! time it was at last--I heard the moving sound of many feet, and then I knew that they were carrying her out, out of the house where she had lived, out of the house wherein she had died, carrying her forth for burial,--forth to the grave her only son had made for her; and I, little, shivering, cowardly soul, hid my face in my hands, and let my tears fall,--not because I knew this proud lady dead,--not because a fibre from my warm heart was being drawn out to be knitted into that fathom-deep grave, for it never would be one of _my_ graves,--but because this death and sorrow _were in the world_, and I must live my life out in a world _with them_. The funeral-bell stirred me. I looked out from the window, and saw the long procession moving slowly on.