steps, and,
bowing to the lady, passed in without a word.

Years--many years--rolled on. The world seemed new again, so much
older was it grown since the night when those pale girls had clasped
their hands across the bosom of the corpse. In the interval a lonely
woman had passed from youth to extreme age, and was known by all the
town as the "Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet." A taint of insanity had
affected her whole life, but so quiet, sad and gentle, so utterly free
from violence, that she was suffered to pursue her harmless fantasies
unmolested by the world with whose business or pleasures she had
naught to do. She dwelt alone, and never came into the daylight except
to follow funerals. Whenever a corpse was borne along the street, in
sunshine, rain or snow, whether a pompous train of the rich and proud
thronged after it or few and humble were the mourners, behind them
came the lonely woman in a long white garment which the people called
her shroud. She took no place among the kindred or the friends, but
stood at the door to hear the funeral prayer, and walked in the rear
of the procession as one whose earthly charge it was to haunt the
house of mourning and be the shadow of affliction and see that the
dead were duly buried. So long had this been her custom that the
inhabitants of the town deemed her a part of every funeral, as much as
the coffin-pall or the very corpse itself, and augured ill of the
sinner's destiny unless the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet came gliding
like a ghost behind. Once, it is said, she affrighted a bridal-party
with her pale presence, appearing suddenly in the illuminated hall
just as the priest was uniting a false maid to a wealthy man before
her lover had been dead a year. Evil was the omen to that marriage.
Sometimes she stole forth by moonlight and visited the graves of
venerable integrity and wedded love and virgin innocence, and every
spot where the ashes of a kind and faithful heart were mouldering.
Over the hillocks of those favored dead would she stretch out her arms
with a gesture as if she were scattering seeds, and many believed that
she brought them from the garden of Paradise, for the graves which she
had visited were green beneath the snow and covered with sweet flowers
from April to November. Her blessing was better than a holy verse upon
the tombstone. Thus wore away her long, sad, peaceful and fantastic
life till few were so old as she, and the people of later generations