en she said good night to Beenie, and went to her
chamber, over that where the loved parent and friend would fall asleep
no more, she felt as if she went walking along to her tomb.

That night was the first herald of the coming winter, and blew a cold
blast from his horn. All day the wind had been out. Wildly in the
churchyard it had pulled at the long grass, as if it would tear it from
its roots in the graves; it had struck vague sounds, as from a hollow
world, out of the great bell overhead in the huge tower; and it had
beat loud and fierce against the corner-buttresses which went
stretching up out of the earth, like arms to hold steady and fast the
lighthouse of the dead above the sea which held them drowned below;
despairingly had the gray clouds drifted over the sky; and, like white
clouds pinioned below, and shadows that could not escape, the surplice
of the ministering priest and the garments of the mourners had flapped
and fluttered as in captive terror; the only still things were the
coffin and the church--and the soul which had risen above the region of
storms in the might of Him who abolished death. At the time Mary had
noted nothing of these things; now she saw them all, as for the first
time, in minute detail, while slowly she went up the stair and through
the narrowed ways, and heard the same wind that raved alike about the
new grave and the old house, into which latter, for all the bales
banked against the walls, it found many a chink of entrance. The smell
of the linen, of the blue cloth, and of the brown paper--things no
longer to be handled by those tender, faithful hands--was dismal and
strange, and haunted her like things that intruded, things which she
had done with, and which yet would not go away. Everything had gone
dead, as it seemed, had exhaled the soul of it, and retained but the
odor of its mortality. If for a moment a thing looked the same as
before, she wondered vaguely, unconsciously, how it could be. The
passages through the merchandise, left only wide enough for one, seemed
like those she had read of in Egyptian tombs and pyramids: a
sarcophagus ought to be waiting in her chamber. When she opened the
door of it, the bright fire, which Beenie undesired had kindled there,
startled her: the room looked unnatural, _uncanny_, because it was
cheerful. She stood for a moment on the hearth, and in sad, dreamy mood
listened to the howling swoops of the wind, making the house quiver and
shake. No