His mother and his sister went about household duties silently, not often apart. They were comforted in companionship, it seemed, but solitude brought tears and heartbreak. Nan May’s London upbringing caused her some thought of what her acquaintances there would have called a “proper” funeral. But here the machinery of such funerals must be brought from a distance, thus becoming doubly expensive; and this being the case, cottagers made very little emulation at such times, and a walking funeral—perhaps at best a cab from the rank at Loughton station—satisfied most. Moreover, the old man himself had many a time preached strong disapproval of money wasted on funerals; had, indeed, prophesied that if any costliness were wasted on him, he would rise from his coffin and kick a mute. So now that the time had come, a Theydon carpenter made the coffin, and a cab from Loughton was the whole show. The old man’s relations were not, and of Nan May’s most still alive were forgotten; for in the forest cottage the little family had been secluded from such connections, as by sundering seas. At first they had seemed too near for correspondence, and then they had been found too far for visiting. Uncle Isaac came to the funeral, however; and though in the beginning he seemed prepared for solemn declamation, something in the sober grief at the cottage made him unwontedly quiet. It was a short coffin, accommodated under the cabman’s seat with no great protrusion at the ends; what there was being covered decently with a black cloth. And the cab held the mourners easily: Johnny and Bessy in their Sunday clothes, their mother in hers (they had always been black since she was first a widow) and Uncle Isaac in a creasy suit of lustrous black, oddly bunched and wrinkled at the seams: the conventional Sunday suit of his generation of artisans, folded carefully and long preserved, and designed to be available alike for church and for such funerals as might come to pass.