hone the man in West
Ashley who dug graves, would do what was to be done outside; and she
would do what was to be done inside, as now, when she sat on the stairs
waiting in case the undertaker needed something.

She was glad that the undertaker was only quiet, white-bearded old Mr.
Hadley, who for so many, many years had given his silent services to the
dead of Ashley that he had come to seem not quite a living figure
himself, hushed and stilled by his association with everlasting
stillness. Marise, cold and numbed with that icy breath upon her, knew
now why the old undertaker was always silent and absent. A strange life
he must have had. She had never thought of it till she had seen him come
into that house, where she and Agnes waited for him, uncertain, abashed,
not knowing what to do. Into how many such houses he must have gone,
with that same quiet look of unsurprised acceptance of what everybody
knew was coming sometime and nobody ever expected to come at all. How
extraordinary that it had never occurred to her that Cousin Hetty, old
as she was, would some day die. You never really believed that anybody
in your own life was ever going to die, or change; any more than you
really believed that you yourself were ever going to grow old, or
change; or that the children were ever really going to grow up. That
threadbare old phrase about the death of old people, "it always comes as
a shock," that was true of all the inevitable things that happened in
life which you saw happen to everyone else, and never believed would
happen to you.

This was the last tie with the past gone, the last person disappeared
for whom she was still the little girl she felt herself now, the little
girl who had lost her way and wanted someone to put her back in the
path. She had a moment of very simple, sweet sorrow, sitting there alone
in the hall, warm tears streaming down her cheeks and falling on her
hands. Cousin Hetty gone, dear old Cousin Hetty, with her bright living
eyes, and her love for all that was young. How much she owed her . . .
those troubled years of her youth when Cousin Hetty and the old house
were unfailing shelter. What shelter had she now?

The pendulum of her mind swung back . . . of course this was silly
traditional repeating of superstitious old words. There was no shelter;
there could be none in this life. No one could show her the path,
because there _was_ no path; and anyone who pretended to show it was
only a charl