Some one, he thought, kept him back from the body while they lifted it down from the cart; there was a stir and bustle and three or four people gathered round, hiding it for a moment from his sight. One, he remembered, had the goat by the horns and was trying to drag it aside; the goat was refractory, kicked and bleated and made itself the centre of a scuffle. Afterwards he pushed through them all and stood looking down at his wife. As he looked at her—limp, with glazed eyes and fallen jaw—there swam before his memory a pitiful vision of the dear Griselda he had married. He saw her—this huddle of rags and dirt—in her wedding garments, fussed and dainty, with her bouquet tied with suffragette ribbons. He remembered the expression, self-conscious and flushing, wherewith she had given her hand that he might place the ring on her finger; and how, when they were first alone as man and wife, he had taken the hand that wore the ring and kissed it till she drew it away. The crowd in the little house at Balham, the handshakes, the well-wishing faces—they were all so close and so present that they gave the lie to this dead woman dropped by the roadside. He looked down stupidly while the bystanders whispered and stared. He did not know how long he sat beside her, nursing a dead hand in his own; but he knew he hated and shrank from the people around him—a group that kept forming and moving away and whispering as it gazed at himself and the body of his wife. It was a changing little crowd, never more than a dozen or so; men and women who stopped in their passing by, muttered questions, heard low answers, looked curious or pitying and moved on. He hated its inquisitiveness, he shrank from its pity, desiring to be alone with his dead. That he might not see its curious and pitying faces he pressed a hand over his eyes. After some time—either minutes or hours—came a hand on his shoulder that stayed till he moved and looked up. He who had touched him wore the garb of a priest; was stout, not over-well washed or brushed, but kindly of manner and countenance. He spoke while the crowd stared and listened; William moved his head irritably, muttered, "I can’t understand what you say," and would have covered his eyes again if he had not heard an English voice beside him. It was a woman who had caught his words and now pushed through the bystanders: a tall young woman in tweed coat and skirt, who had stayed to look over the shoulders of the shifting group. "You are English?" she said. "What has happened?" He stared up at her for a moment, amazed at the sound of his own tongue. "My wife is dead," he told her; and, hearing himself say the words aloud, he burst into a passion of sobbing. Through it he choked incoherent appeals to "take them away—for God’s sake to let him be alone." He turned his face to the wall and wept, long and brokenly, as one who has nothing more to hope; and for a time they left him till the paroxysm should wear itself out.