“I will not come to your mother’s funeral,” he wrote. “I respected your mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she is dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in Wildman’s, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore’s shop, I will go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If he or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of the dead.” The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something that had slipped from him. “It is good sense, after all,” he thought, and realised that even in the days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the fact that Jane McPherson’s long, hard role was just being played out to the end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore was beating upon his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with a flourish. He arose, interrupting the minister’s discourse. Mary Underwood had come in just as the minister began talking and had dropped into an obscure corner near the door leading into the street. Sam crowded past the women who stared and the minister who frowned and the baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands and, dropping the note into her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking and listening with breathless curiosity, “It is from John Telfer. Read it. Even he, hating women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door.” In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward the school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had created, went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting until the talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the streets should be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book. “I have become older than all of these people here,” thought the youth. “They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of my hand.”