ent to push on any farther into the future. I have such a
beautiful Memory Road to travel back over. I'd rather sit and recall the
turns in that than wonder what lies on ahead."

"For instance," suggested Mary, and Mrs. Ware immediately began a
reminiscence that Mary remembered hearing when a child. But to-day she
realized that there was a difference in the telling. Her mother was not
repeating it as she used to do to amuse the children who clamored for
tales of Once upon a time. She was speaking as one woman to another,
opening a chapter into the inmost history of her heart.

"She recognizes the fact that I'm grown up," Mary thought to herself
with satisfaction, and she was conscious that her mother was taking
quite as deep a pleasure in this sense of equal understanding and
companionship as she.

It was nearly sundown when a slow creaking of wheels and soft thud of
hoofs on the grass-grown road called their attention to a short
procession of wagons and horsemen, winding along towards the house. A
long pine box was in the first wagon, and several families crowded into
the others.

"Oh, it's a funeral procession!" whispered Mary, pushing back a little
further into the shadow of the vines, so as to be out of sight. "It must
be that Mr. Locksley who was killed yesterday over at Hemlock Ridge by a
falling tree. Isn't it awful?"

She gave a little shiver and her eyes filled with tears as they rested
on the children in the second wagon. There had been a pitiful attempt to
honor the dead by following the conventions. The woman who sat bowed
over on the front seat like an image of despair, wore a black veil and
cotton gloves; and black sunbonnets, evidently borrowed from grown-up
neighbors, covered the flaxen hair of three little girls in pink calico
dresses, who nestled against her. There was a band of rusty crape
fastened around the gray cow-boy hat that the boy wore.

The pathetic little procession wound on past the house and up the hill,
then was lost to sight as it passed into a grove of cedars on the right,
behind which lay the lonely cemetery. Only a few times in her life had
Mary come this close to death. Now the horror of it seemed to blot out
all the brightness of the sweet May day, and the thought of the
grief-stricken woman in the wagon cast such a shadow over her that her
eyes were full of unshed tears and her hands trembled when she took up
her needle again.

"It's so awful!" she exclaimed, when they had