"Marion--I wish you could have Mr. Vireo to talk to you; or Luclarion Grapp. Won't you come home with me, and let them come to see you? They _know_ about these things, dear." "Would you take me home?" asked Marion, slowly, looking her in the face. "Yes, indeed. Will you come?" "O, do take me and hide me away, and let me cry!" She dropped herself, as it were passively, into Rachel Ingraham's hands. She could not stay among the neighbors, she said. She could not stay in that house alone, one day. Ray stayed with her, until after the funeral. Marion would not go to the church. She had let them decide everything just as they pleased, thinking only that she could not think about any of it. Mrs. Kent had been a faithful, humble church-member for forty years, and the minister and her fellow-members wanted her to be brought there. There was no room in the little half-house, where she had lived, for neighbors and friends to gather, and for the services properly to take place. So it was decided. But when the time came, and it was too late to change, Marion said,--"She belonged to them, and they have done by her. They can all go, but I can't. To sit up in the front pew as a mourner, and be looked at, and prayed for, as if I had been a real child, and had only _lost_ my mother! You know I can't, Ray. I will stay here, and bear my punishment. May be if I bear it _all_ now--do you believe it might make any difference?" Ray stayed with her through the whole. While all was still in the church, not ten rods off, a carriage came for them to the little white gate. With the silken blinds down, and the windows open behind them, it was driven to the cemetery, and in beneath the sheltering trees, to a stopping place just upon a little side turn, near the newly opened grave. No one, of those who alighted from the vehicles of the short procession, knew exactly when or how it had come. The words of the prayer beside the grave,--most tenderly framed by the good old minister, for the ear he knew they would reach--came in soft and clear upon the pleasant air. "And we know, Lord, as we lay these friends away, one after another, that we give them into Thy hands,--into Thy heart; that we give into Thy heart, also, all our love and our sorrow, and our penitence for whatever more we might have been or done toward them; that through Thee, our thought of them can reach them forever. We pray Thee to forgive us, as we know we do forgive each other; to keep alive and true in us the love by which we hold each other; and finally to bring us face to face in Thy glory, which is Thy loving presence among us all. We ask Thee to do this, by the pity and grace that are in Thy Christ, our Saviour." After that, they were driven straight in, over the long Avenue, to the city, and to the quiet house in Pilgrim Street.