They had come alone, and Josey preceded her mother into the little room, as if she were impatient to have any meeting with a fresh face over.  She was pale as any pale blossom of spring, and as calm.  Her curls, tucked away under the widow’s-cap she wore, and clouded by the mass of crape that shrouded her, left only a narrow line of gold above the dead quiet of her brow.  Her eyes were like the eyes of a sleep-walker:  they seemed to see, but not to feel sight.  She smiled mechanically, and put a cold hand into mine.  For any outward expression of emotion, one might have thought Mrs. Bowen the widow:  her eyes were bloodshot and swollen, her nose was red, her lips tremulous, her whole face stained and washed with tears, and the skin seemed wrinkled by their salt floods.  She had cried herself sick,—­more over Josephine than Frank, as was natural.

It was but a short drive over to my house, but an utterly silent one.  Josephine made no sort of demonstration, except that she stooped to pat my great dog as we went in.  I gave her a room that opened out of mine, and put Mrs. Bowen by herself.  Twice in the night I stole in to look at her:  both times I found her waking, her eyes fixed on the open window, her face set in its unnatural quiet; she smiled, but did not speak.  Mrs. Bowen told me in the morning that she had neither shed a tear nor slept since the news came; it seemed to strike her at once into this cold silence, and so she had remained.  About ten, a carriage was sent over from the village to take them to the funeral.  This miserable custom of ours, that demands the presence of women at such ceremonies, Mrs. Bowen was the last person to evade; and when I suggested to Josey that she should stay at home with me, she looked surprised, and said, quietly, but emphatically, “Oh, no!”

After they were gone, I took my shawl and went out on the lawn.  There was a young pine dense enough to shield me from the sun, sitting under which I could see the funeral-procession as it wound along the river’s edge up toward the burying-ground, a mile beyond the station.  But there was no sun to trouble me; cool gray clouds brooded ominously over all the sky; a strong south-wind cried, and wailed, and swept in wild gusts through the woods, while in its intervals a dreadful quiet brooded over earth and heaven,—­over the broad weltering river, that, swollen by recent rain, washed the green grass shores with sullen flood,—­over the heavy masses of oak and hickory trees that hung on the farther hill-side,—­over the silent village and its gathering people.  The engine-shriek was borne on the coming wind from far down the valley.  There was an air of hushed expectation and regret in Nature itself that seemed to fit the hour to its event.