In the smaller box was the baby of Alice, very, very small and pinched and blue, even more small and pinched and blue than when she used to bring it to the cantine. The family of Alice consisted of a small boy with bare feet and no hat, a small girl with a queer colored skirt and felt slippers and a bit of black crape over her red hair, and a boy of perhaps seventeen, also in felt slippers, with his coat collar turned up and a muffler round his chin and his cap dragged down over his eyes. Alice had a hat and a crape veil and a black coat and skirt, and down-trodden, shapeless shoes much too big for her. There was a small bunch of violets in the pine box with the baby. We put our roses down on the floor at the foot of the box. Both babies had on the little white slips that the hospital gives. The family of the bigger baby, and the brother and sister of Alice, stared at us. The mother of the bigger baby stood leaning against the wall, her head against the whitewash, her two hands over her eyes. She was making a queer little noise through her teeth. She kept it up all the time we were in the shed, a sort of hissing. She never once uncovered her eyes. Alice was standing close, close beside her baby in the pine box, just looking down at it. She never took her eyes from it. She is a tall, straight girl, but she was bent over, as if she were feeble and old. Her veil was pushed back from her face. It had been wet, and the black had run over her face. But it must have been the rain, for she was not crying at all. All the time in the shed she never moved or cried at all. Her little brother and sister stood back as if they were afraid of her. Claire and I waited near the door of the shed. For a long time we waited like that. Then two croquemorts came, in their shining black clothes. One of them had a sort of hammer in his hand. They went to the box of the bigger baby, and one of them picked up the cover of the box and put it on, and the other began to drive the nails in. When he drove the first nail in, the woman with her eyes covered so she could not see him, heard, and knew what it was, and began to shriek. With her hands over her eyes she stood against the wall and shrieked. The croquemort drove in all the nails, and the woman kept on shrieking. Then the other croquemort put the tin wreath on the lid of the box, and then both of them came over to our baby. Alice had been just looking and looking at her baby. When the men came, and one of them took up the lid of the box from the floor, and the other stood with his hammer, she gathered herself up as if she would spring upon the men who would take her little dead thing from her and put it away for ever. I thought she would fight over it, quite mad. The little brother and sister stood away from her, shivering.