In the meantime it was known in the neighbourhood that parson Craik was going to preach a funeral sermon for poor old Madam the very next Sunday morning, and an edifying description of her death passed from mouth to mouth—­how she had called her little great-grandson, Peter, to her as the child was playing near, probably that she might give him her blessing—­how, when the nurse came running out, she had seen her looking most earnestly at him, but evidently not able to say a word.  Afterwards, she had a little revived and had risen and beautifully expressed her gratitude to all about her for their long kindness and attention, and then, how, piously lifting up her hands and eyes, she had told them that she was now going to meet with those that she had loved and lost.  “O Lord!” she had exclaimed, “what a meeting that will be!” and thereupon she had departed without a sigh.

For several days after this Mr. Mortimer and his brother went about the business left to them to do.  They sent for an architect, and put the house into his hands to be thoroughly repaired.  Mrs. Peter Melcombe was desirous not to leave it, and this they arranged to allow, giving orders that the apartments which the family had always occupied should remain untouched till the rest of the house was finished and ready for her.  They also had the garden-door repaired to give her ingress, and the gallery-gate taken away.  These same sons who for so many years had never come near their mother, seemed now very anxious to attend to her every wish; scarcely a shrub was cut down in the garden excepting in the presence of one of them, and when Mrs. Peter Melcombe especially begged that the grandmother’s wish respecting the bed of lilies might be attended to, Mr. Mortimer, with evident emotion, gave orders to the gardener that it should not be touched.

And then Sunday came, and with it a trial that the two sons had not expected.  It was announced by the churchwarden to the family, first to the ladies at the hall, and then to the gentlemen at the inn, that Mr. Craik was going to preach a funeral sermon.  He did not wish, he said, to take them by surprise—­he felt that they would wish to know.  In his secret soul he believed that the old men would not come to hear it—­he hoped they would not, because their absence would enable him more freely to speak of the misfortunes of the deceased.

But they did come.  The manner of their coming was thought by the congregation to be an acknowledgment that they felt their fault.  They did not look any one in the face; but with brows bent down, and eyes on the ground, they went to the places given them in the family pew, and when morning prayers were over and the text was given out, as still as stones they sat and listened.

“Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his.”

The sermon was more full of eulogy than was in good taste, but the ladies of the family did not find it so; they wept passionately—­so did many of the congregation, but the two sons, though their hands might plainly be seen to tremble, maintained a deep, distressed immobility, and because it was neither right to upbraid them to their faces, nor to judge them publicly, a piece of the sermon which concerned Madam Melcombe’s sorrow, caused by their desertion, was mercifully left out.