seen so little of her mother in life, but who had traveled far to do her honor after death.
They all sat around a great table which was loaded with hearty food—boiled beef and baked ham and stacks of bread, pickles and slaw and potato salad, and cakes and pies and preserves. Hildegarde drank a glass of milk and crumbled some bread on her plate. The people around her were solicitous. "You ought to eat," they said. She felt they would have been more solicitous if she had cried at the funeral. She was sure they thought she should have cried. They couldn't, of course, know how numb she had felt. And dazed. She saw their faces now around the table in a blurred line. None of them looked natural; they were either too broad or too tall—as she had seen people in convex and concave mirrors. And they were wabbly, like a reflection in water when the wind blows over it—
She heard some one cry sharply, "Hildegarde," and another voice, "She has fainted."
She came to herself to find that she was on the sofa in the sitting-room, and that a lot of women were bending over her. Aunt Olivia had a glass in her hand which gave out the sweet, spiced aroma of home-made wine.
She learned, when at last she sat up, that her fainting had given her a new place among them. They no longer thought her unfeeling. When the meal was finished, they would not let her help clear the table. They insisted that she lie on the sofa and rest.
Some of the guests went away as soon as they had eaten, but some of the women stayed to help Aunt Catherine and Aunt Olivia wash the dishes, and set the house in order. The men who belonged to these women
