of purpose, his eyes on everything and his mind nowhere; herself trotting over the broken stones in her canvas shoes beside him, a pale shadow under the fire of his red head.  They had gone away into a road whose milestones were dark houses, himself singing the song of his own life, a song of mumbled words, without air or music; herself silent, clutching her thin shawl over her breast, her feet pattering over the little stones of the road....  The wind whistled down over the graves, by the wooden crosses....  There was that little woman who at the close of the day, when the light was charitable in its obscurity, opened her door and came down from the threshold of her house, painfully as if she were descending from a great height.  Nobody was about.  All was quietness in the quiet street.  And she drew the door to, put the key in the lock, her hand trembled, the lock clicked!  The deed was done!  Who but herself could know that the click of the key in the lock was the end, the close, the dreadful culmination of the best part of a whole century of struggle, of life?  Behind that door she had swept up a bundle of memories that were now all an agony because the key had clicked in the lock.  Behind the door was the story of her life and the lives of her children and her children’s children.  Where was the use, she might have asked, of blaming any of them now?  What was it that they had all gone, all scattered, leaving her broken there at the last?  Had not the key clicked in the lock?  In that click was the end of it all; in the empty house were the ghosts of her girlhood, her womanhood, her motherhood, her old age, her struggles, her successes, her skill in running her little shop, her courage in riding one family squall after another!  The key had clicked in the lock.  She moved down the quiet street, sensitive lest the eye of the neighbours should see her, a tottering, broken thing going by the vague walls, keeping to the back streets, setting out for the dark house beyond the town.  She had said to them, “I will be no trouble to you.”  And, indeed, she was not.  They had little more to do for her than join her hands over her breast....  The wind was plaintive in the gaunt trees of the dark wood....  Which of us could say he would never turn a key in the lock of an empty house?  How many casual little twists of the wrist of Fate stand between the best of us and the step down from the threshold of a broken home?  What rags of memories have any of us to bundle behind the door of the empty house when the hour comes for us to click the key in the lock?...  The wind cried down the narrow strip of ground where the smell of decay was in the grass.

There was a movement beside the white coffin, the men were lifting it off the golden pile of earth and lowering it into the dark pit.  The men’s feet slipped and shuffled for a foothold in the yielding clay.  At last a low, dull thud sounded up from the mouth of the pit.  Our brother in the white coffin had at last found a lasting tenure in the soil.