She was glad that the undertaker was only quiet, white-bearded old Mr. Hadley, who for so many, many years had given his silent services to the dead of Ashley that he had come to seem not quite a living figure himself, hushed and stilled by his association with everlasting stillness.  Marise, cold and numbed with that icy breath upon her, knew now why the old undertaker was always silent and absent.  A strange life he must have had.  She had never thought of it till she had seen him come into that house, where she and Agnes waited for him, uncertain, abashed, not knowing what to do.  Into how many such houses he must have gone, with that same quiet look of unsurprised acceptance of what everybody knew was coming sometime and nobody ever expected to come at all.  How extraordinary that it had never occurred to her that Cousin Hetty, old as she was, would some day die.  You never really believed that anybody in your own life was ever going to die, or change; any more than you really believed that you yourself were ever going to grow old, or change; or that the children were ever really going to grow up.  That threadbare old phrase about the death of old people, “it always comes as a shock,” that was true of all the inevitable things that happened in life which you saw happen to everyone else, and never believed would happen to you.

This was the last tie with the past gone, the last person disappeared for whom she was still the little girl she felt herself now, the little girl who had lost her way and wanted someone to put her back in the path.  She had a moment of very simple, sweet sorrow, sitting there alone in the hall, warm tears streaming down her cheeks and falling on her hands.  Cousin Hetty gone, dear old Cousin Hetty, with her bright living eyes, and her love for all that was young.  How much she owed her . . . those troubled years of her youth when Cousin Hetty and the old house were unfailing shelter.  What shelter had she now?

The pendulum of her mind swung back . . . of course this was silly traditional repeating of superstitious old words.  There was no shelter; there could be none in this life.  No one could show her the path, because there was no path; and anyone who pretended to show it was only a charlatan who traded on moments of weakness like this.

Mr. Hadley opened the door quietly and asked in that seldom-heard voice of his for a couple of soft, clean towels.  Where did Cousin Hetty keep her towels?  In the chest of drawers at the end of the hall.  An odor of cloves came up spicily into the air as Marise opened the drawer.  How like Cousin Hetty to have that instead of the faded, sentimental lavender.  She had perhaps put those towels away there last night, with her busy, shaking old hands, so still now.  All dead, the quaintness, the vitality, the zest in life, the new love for little Elly, all dead now, as though it had never been, availing nothing.  There was nothing that did not die.