At the cottage gate, however, he overtook the good dentist, bearing a large florist's box. Miss M'Gann was already within the little front room, and Alves was talking in low tones with a sallow youth in a clerical coat. At the sight of the newcomers the clergyman withdrew to put on his robes. Dr. Leonard, having surrendered the pasteboard box to Miss M'Gann, grasped Mrs. Preston's hand. "Alves," he began, and stopped. Even he could feel that the commonplaces of the occasion were not in order. "Alves, you know how mighty fond of you I am." She smiled tranquilly. Her air of calm reserve mystified the watchful young doctor. The clergyman returned, followed by Mrs. Ducharme and Anna Svenson. The Ducharme woman's black dress intensified the pallor of her flabby face. Her hands twitched nervously over the prayer-book that she held. Subject to apoplexy, Sommers judged; but his thoughts passed over her as well as Miss M'Gann, who stood with downcast eyes ostentatiously close to Mrs. Preston, and the grave old dentist standing at the foot of the coffin, and the clergyman whose young voice had not lost its thrill of awe in the presence of death. He had no eyes for aught but the woman, who was bound to him by firmer ties than those whose dissolution the clergyman was recording. She stood serene, with head raised above theirs, revealing a face that sadness had made serious, grave, mature, but not sad. She displayed no affected sorrow, no nervous tremor, no stress of a reproachful mind. Unconscious of the others, even of the minister's solemn phrases, she seemed to be revolving truths of her own, dismissing a problem private to her own heart. To the man who tried to pierce beneath that calm gaze, the woman's complete control was terrible. The minister's grave voice went on, pronouncing the grave sentences of the service. The ceremonial words sounded all the more fateful said over this poor body. The little of life that he had had,--the eating and drinking in restaurants and hotels, the chaffing and trading with his own kind, the crude appeasements of crude desires,--all these were taken away, and thus stripped it was easy to see how small was his responsibility in the matter of life. He had crushed and injured this other human being, his wife, to whom he had come nearest, just as a dirty hand might soil and crumple a fine fabric. But she no longer reproached him, if she ever had; she understood the sad complexity of a fate that had brought into the hand the fabric to be tarnished. And what she could accept, others must, the world must, to whom the Prestons are but annoyances and removable blemishes.