seemed to press against the very windows over which the green
blinds were drawn.

But that long wave of rich life, as it glided across the lawn and in
among the solemn pine-trees, was a little hushed and subdued. The birds
sang in the trees beyond--the bobolinks gushed in the meadows below. But
there was a little space of silence about the house.

In the large drawing-room, draped in cool-colored chintz, where once
Gabriel Bennet and Abel Newt had seen Hope Wayne, on the table where
books had lain like porcelain ornaments, lay a strange piece of
furniture, long, and spreading at one end, smelling of new varnish,
studded with high silver-headed nails, and with a lid. It was lined
with satin. Yes, it was a casket.

The room was more formal, and chilly, and dim than ever. Puffs of air
crept through it as if frightened--frightened to death before they
got out again. The smell of the varnish was stronger than that of the
clover-blossoms, or the roses or honey-suckles outside in the fields and
gardens, and about the piazzas.

Upon the wall hung the portrait of Christopher Burt at the age of ten,
standing in clean clothes, holding a hoop in one hand and a book in the
other. It was sixty-four years before that the portrait was painted, and
if one had come searching for that boy he would have found him--by
lifting that lid he would have seen him; but in those sunken features,
that white hair, that startling stillness of repose, would he have
recognized the boy of the soft eyes and the tender heart, whose June
clover had not yet blossomed?

There was a creaking, crackling sound upon the gravel in the avenue, and
then a carriage emerged from behind the hedge, and another, and another.
They were family carriages, and stopped at the front door, which was
swung wide open. There was no sound but the letting down of steps and
slamming of doors, and the rolling away of wheels. People with grave
faces, which they seemed to have put on for the occasion as they put on
white gloves for weddings, stepped out and came up the steps. They were
mostly clad in sober colors, and said nothing, or conversed in a low,
murmuring tone, or in whispers. They entered the house and seated
themselves in the library, with the large, solemn Family Bible, and
the empty inkstand, and the clean pen-wiper, and the paper knife, and
the melancholy recluses of books locked into their cells.

Presently some one would come to the door and beckon with his finger