From the church, when the burial service was over, the body was borne to a mausoleum of granite, gloomy, dark and solemn, which had been the place of sepulchre of the Roxhall family for many centuries. The building above ground was of the eighteenth century, but the crypt beneath it was as old as the days of the great oak in the park which was called King Alfred’s. Its subterranean vaults were spacious and spread far under arched ceilings, supported by short Doric pillars; here there were many knights lying in effigy on their tombs; many shields hung to the columns, many banners drooping in the gloom; here an ancient, gallant, chivalrous race had placed its dead in their last rest for a thousand years. The latest made grave was a little child’s, a three-year-old daughter of Roxhall’s, with a white marble lily carved on the marble above her, for her name had been Lillias, and she had died from a fall. The coffin of William Massarene was placed beside this little child’s. The keeper of a gambling den lay with the fair children, the pure women, and the brave men of an honored race. To Katherine the desecration of the place seemed blasphemous. How could Roxhall have sold the very graves of his race? She thought of his cousin Hurstmanceaux; _he_ would have died sooner. As the choir sang the _Benedictus_ of Gounod, and the sweet spiritual melodies warbled softly over the still open vault, she felt sick with the satire and the derision of the whole scene. The Lord-Lieutenant, who stood on her right, looked at her with anxiety. “Do you feel faint?” he asked. “Is it too much for you? Ladies should not go through such trying ceremonies.” “I am quite well, thanks,” she replied coldly; and he too thought what an uncivil and unfeeling person she was. “I suppose she is not sure to inherit, and so is worried,” thought the gentleman; he could imagine no other possible motive for so much coldness and so much evidently painful emotion. “Well, ’tis all over,” thought the dead man’s widow. “But ’tis strange to think as so masterful a man as poor dear William is gone where he won’t never have his own way any more!” Her ideas of a future state were vague, but so far as they were formulated, they always represented immortal life to her as a kind of perpetual Sunday school, with much music and considerable discipline. She felt that William would be very uncomfortable with such limited opportunities for “making deals” and swinging his stock-whip, as it were, around him. She was a devoutly religious woman, but her common sense made her piety a difficult matter, as common sense is apt to do to many pious persons. She could not bring her mind into any actual conception of her dead husband as powerless to assert his will, or gone whither his banking-books would be useless to buy him a warm place.