They drove back together alone without a word, sitting close together, not looking at each other--saying nothing. A few neighbours, out of ‘respect,’ had attended old Mr. Sandford’s funeral; and many hearts in the village were sore for John. Behind the drawn blinds in the rectory, and in many humbler houses, they spoke of the boy with great tenderness. ‘He’ll find out the difference,’ people said. ‘The old people thought there was nobody like him: but if it’s an aunt, perhaps with children of her own----’ And none of the little cortége returned with the mourners to the house. The two were left altogether alone. The little parlour was in painful good order, the blinds drawn up, the daylight coming in as usual, the hearth so cleanly swept, the fire so bright, the two chairs standing one on each side. It was all so suggestive of the old people, as if they might have only gone out for a walk, arm in arm, in their old way, and soon would come in and sit down and look up smiling at their boy, and bid him come near the fire, for it was a cold day. This suggestion flashed to John’s heart as he came in, and might have overwhelmed him with sorrow and tears; but the presence of that tall figure in her black cloak and close bonnet effectually put a stop to any expression. She drew one of those chairs from the fire to the table, without any sense of desecration, or of disturbing any sacred image, and sat down. Her face was very grave, but without any harshness. She was always very serious, yielding to no lighter impulses. She turned to John, who stood vaguely, not knowing what he was to do, by the table. ‘Now,’ she said, not without feeling, ‘there are only us two--we must try to understand each other.’ He made no reply. The movement she had made of the chair, though perfectly simple and quite unintended, was enough to re-awaken in his mind all the resistance, the repulsion, which indeed her action throughout had never suffered to fade. For she had managed everything in a perfectly clear, unhesitating, business way, giving her orders with quiet and brief decision saving everybody trouble, but leaving no place for any consultation, for any of those faltering conversations upon what would have been most pleasant, or according to the ideas of the departed, which draw together mourners in their grief. There was no particular appearance of grief in her at all. She was serious and pale; but then, she was always so, and there had been no room for sentiment in anything she had done or said.