’Bring me some cotton for my ears.  I never can stand that noise.  It is a peculiar cry.’

The cotton was brought.  A window in the hall which had a habit of rattling with every breath of wind was made fast with a bit of shingle whittled out for that purpose, and then Arthur became tolerably quiet until morning, when he began to talk to himself in the German language, which Charles could not understand.  But he caught the name Gretchen, and knew she was the subject of the sick man’s thoughts.  Suddenly turning to his attendant, to whom he always spoke in English, Arthur said: 

‘The funeral is to-day?’

‘Yes, sir, at ten o’clock.’

’Well, lock every door leading up this way, and shut out the gossipping blockheads who will come by hundreds, and, if we would let them, swarm into my room as thick as the frogs were in the houses of the Egyptians.  Shut the doors, Charles, and keep them out.’

So the doors were shut and bolted, and then Arthur lay listening with that intensity which so quickens one’s hearing, that the faintest sounds are distinct at great distances.  He heard the trampling footsteps as the people came crowding in, and the tread of horses’ feet as sleigh after sleigh drove up the avenue, and once, with a shudder, he said: 

‘That is the hearse.  I am sure of it.’

Then all was still, and listen as he might he could not distinguish the faintest sound until the services were over and the people began to leave the house.

‘There,’ he said, with a sigh of relief; ’it will soon be over.  Bring me my clothes, Charles.  I am going to get up and see the last of this poor woman.  God help her, whoever she was.’

He was beginning to feel a great pity for the woman whose coffin they were putting in the hearse, which moved off a few rods, and then stopped until the open sleigh came up, the sleigh in which Frank Tracy sat, muffled in his heavy overcoat, for the day, though bright and sunny, was cold, and a chill March wind was blowing.  Dolly had taken refuge in a headache which had prevented her from being present at the funeral and kept her from going to the grave as her husband had wished her to do.  So only Harold and Jerry occupied the sleigh with Frank, and these sat opposite him, with their backs to the horses, Jerry in her gray cloak and blue hood showing conspicuously as she came into full view of the window where Arthur stood looking at the procession with a feeling at his heart, as if in some way he were interested in the sad funeral, where there was no mourner, no one who had ever seen or known the deceased, save the little helpless girl, looking around her in perfect unconcern save as she rather liked the stir and all that was going on.

They had tied a thin veil over her head to shield her from the cold, and thus her face was not visible to Arthur.  But he saw the blue hood and the golden hair on the old gray cloak, and the sight of it moved him mightily, making him hold fast to the window-casing for support, while he stood watching it.  Just as far as he could see it his eye followed that hood, and when it disappeared from view, he turned from the window, deathly sick, and tottering back to his bedroom, vomited from sheer nervous excitement.