Human curiosity could not keep aloof at a moment such as this, and as Mattie advanced toward the Lovell lot, the neighbors followed as if irresistibly impelled. They closed in a ring around the spot when she reached it, and they looked and listened with an eagerness so frank as almost to be excusable. They could see that the earlier comers were watching from behind the handkerchiefs pressed to their eyes, and with the approbation which belongs to a successful dramatic performance the audience noted also the entire coolness with which Miss Seaton ignored them until she stood close to the drooping pair. Then she flung back her long veil of crape with a sweeping gesture, and with a regal glance of her gypsyish black eyes looked first at them and then at the flowers. "Oh, thank you so much for bringing flowers," she said, in a voice evidently so raised that her words should be distinctly heard by the ring of spectators. "Archie was so fond of them!" The words gave no chance of reply, and an audible chuckle arose from the listening throng, so obviously had her tone and manner made the other mourners outsiders. When Mattie slowly and deliberately moved around the headstone until she stood behind it, hung her wreath on its rounded top, and bowed her head upon it with her handkerchief covering her eyes, she had completely taken possession of the whole situation. As one of the young men of the town inelegantly observed, she was "boss of that grave and the others did n't count." As if in a carefully planned _tableau vivant_, she stood, a drooping figure of anguish, while the other two had become merely kneeling ministrants upon her woe. "Well, if that ain't the beatin'est!" chuckled old Ichabod Munson, puckering his leathery face into an ecstasy of wrinkles. "Gosh, I wish Archie Lovell could see that. He'd be 'most willin' to get kilt for a sight o' his three widders, an' that Seaton girl comin' it so over t' others." "He'd think he was a Mormon or a Turk," observed Miss Charlotte Kendall, with her deep, throaty chuckle that not even the solemnity of the graveyard could subdue. "He'd see the fun of it. Poor Archie! He did love a joke." The situation over the tombstone was one from which retreat to be effective must be speedy. Mattie Seaton was apparently the only one to appreciate this. But for a few moments did she remain with her forehead bent to the slab; then she kissed the cold marble feverishly; and in a voice broken, but still in tones easily audible to the listening neighbors, she said to the kneeling girls:-- "Thank you so much for your sympathy;" and before they could reply she had dropped again the cloud of crape over her face, and was moving swiftly away up the path to the gate.