al to a height where the
personal rises at last into the universal. Then the ebb had come; the
sense of tragedy had lessened slowly with the prolongation of feeling;
and the universal vision had dissolved and crystallized into the
pitiless physical needs of the individual. After the funeral a wave
almost of relief had swept over the town at the thought that the
suspension and the strain were at an end. The business of keeping alive,
and the moral compulsion of keeping abreast of one's neighbours,
reasserted their supremacy even while the carriages, quickening their
pace a trifle on the return drive, rolled out of the churchyard. Now at
the end of a week only Virginia and her mother would take the time from
living to sit down and remember.

In the adjoining room, which was the nursery, Mrs. Pendleton was sitting
beside the window, with her Bible open on her knees, and her head bent a
little in the direction of Miss Priscilla, who was mending a black dress
by the table.

"It is so sweet of you, dear Miss Priscilla," she murmured in her vague
and gentle voice as Virginia entered. So old, so pallid, so fragile she
looked, that she might have been mistaken by a stranger for a woman of
eighty, yet the impossibility of breaking the habit of a lifetime kept
the lines of her face still fixed in an expression of anxious
cheerfulness. For more than forty years she had not thought of herself,
and now that the opportunity had come for her to do so, she found that
she had almost forgotten the way that one went about it. Even grief
could not make her selfish any more than it could make her untidy. Her
manner, like her dress, was so little a matter of impulse, and so
largely a matter of discipline and of conscience, that it expressed her
broken heart hardly more than did the widow's cap on her head or the
mourning brooch that fastened the crape folds of her collar.

"Do you want anything, mother darling? What can I do for you?" asked
Virginia, stooping to kiss her.

"Nothing, dear. I was just telling Miss Priscilla that I had had a visit
from Mr. Treadwell, and that"--her voice quivered a little--"he showed
more feeling than I should have believed possible. He even wanted to
make me an allowance."

Miss Priscilla drew out her large linen handkerchief, which was like a
man's, and loudly blew her nose. "I always said there was more in Cyrus
than people thought," she observed. "Here, I've shortened this dress,
Jinny, until it's just