Flowers covered the pall and stood piled beside the grave. Crosses, wreaths, and various trophies were here, together with many little humble bunches from cottage gardens, and not a few mere gleanings from the hedgerow of scarlet and crimson berries, or the last autumnal splendour of beech and briar. The air was heavy with emotion, and many wept. A congregational minister conducted the service, and the vicar helped him. After the body had sunk to earth and the rite was nearly accomplished, the chief mourners took their last look upon the lid, according to custom. Leaves whirled in the air, and the branches overhead made a mighty sigh and swough in the brief silence. Underfoot was trampled mire and reeking grass. A pushing child slipped in the clay at the grave-mouth, and nearly fell in. She was dragged back by Thomas Gollop and despatched weeping to the rear. Humphrey Baskerville came almost the last to look into the grave, and as others had fallen away from it when he did so, he assumed a momentary prominence. His small, bent, and sombre shape appeared alone at the edge of the cleft-in earth, with flowers piled about his knees. Then suddenly, ominously, cutting its way through the full diapason of the storm-sounds on trees and tower, there crept a different utterance. The wind shouted deep and loud; but this noise was thin and harsh--a hissing, a sharp, shrill sibilation that gained volume presently and spread epidemic into the crowded ranks of the collected men. They were mostly the young who permitted themselves this attack, but not a few of their elders joined with them. The sounds deepened; a groan or two threaded the hisses. Then Baskerville, from his abstraction, awakened to the terrific fact that here, beside his brother's grave, in the eyes of all men, a demonstration had broken out against him. Hands were pointed, even fists were shaken. He could not immediately understand; he looked helplessly into certain angry faces, and then shrank back from the grave to where his relations stood. "What's the meaning of this?" he asked Ned; but the young man turned and pretended not to hear him. Then the truth came hurtling like a missile. Voices shouted at him the words 'murderer' and 'brother-killer.'