From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door opened, the import of it was clear.  The mother was abusing the maid for having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which had been prepared for the watchers.  Steavens had never heard anything in the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had been her grief of twenty minutes before.  With a shudder of disgust the lawyer went into the dining-room and closed the door into the kitchen.

“Poor Roxy’s getting it now,” he remarked when he came back.  “The Merricks took her out of the poor-house years ago; and if her loyalty would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that would curdle your blood.  She’s the mulatto woman who was standing in here a while ago, with her apron to her eyes.  The old woman is a fury; there never was anybody like her.  She made Harvey’s life a hell for him when he lived at home; he was so sick ashamed of it.  I never could see how he kept himself sweet.”

“He was wonderful,” said Steavens slowly, “wonderful; but until tonight I have never known how wonderful.”

“That is the eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come even from such a dung heap as this,” the lawyer cried, with a sweeping gesture which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within which they stood.

“I think I’ll see whether I can get a little air.  The room is so close I am beginning to feel rather faint,” murmured Steavens, struggling with one of the windows.  The sash was stuck, however, and would not yield, so he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar.  The lawyer came over, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist and sent the window up a few inches.  Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had been gradually climbing into his throat for the last half hour left him with but one desire—­a desperate feeling that he must get away from this place with what was left of Harvey Merrick.  Oh, he comprehended well enough now the quiet bitterness of the smile that he had seen so often on his master’s lips!

Once when Merrick returned from a visit home, he brought with him a singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee; while a full-lipped, full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up by a single gallows, stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to call her attention to a butterfly he had caught.  Steavens, impressed by the tender and delicate modelling of the thin, tired face, had asked him if it were his mother.  He remembered the dull flush that had burned up in the sculptor’s face.

The lawyer was sitting in a rocking-chair beside the coffin, his head thrown back and his eyes closed.  Steavens looked at him earnestly, puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should conceal a feature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of beard.  Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor’s keen glance, Jim Laird opened his eyes.