“Thank ye, I’m sure,” said the aunt, relenting slightly.  “You can speak to my man about it, and he’ll give it to somebody that’s going by.  I’ve got to walk in the procession.  They’ll be obliged, I’m sure.  I s’pose you’re the young ladies that come here right after the Fourth o’ July, ain’t you?  I should be pleased to have you call and see the child’n if you’re over this way again.  I heard ’em talk about you last time I was over.  Won’t ye step into the house and see him?  He looks real natural,” she added.  But we said, “No, thank you.”

Leander told us he believed he wouldn’t bother about the dory that day, and he should be there at the house whenever we were ready.  He evidently considered it a piece of good luck that he had happened to arrive in time for the funeral.  We spoke to the man about the things we had brought for the children, which seemed to delight him, poor soul, and we felt sure he would be kind to them.  His wife shouted to him from a window of the house that he’d better not loiter round, or they wouldn’t be half ready when the folks began to come, and we said good by to him and went away.

It was a beautiful morning, and we walked slowly along the shore to the high rocks and the pitch-pine trees which we had seen before; the air was deliciously fresh, and one could take long deep breaths of it.  The tide was coming in, and the spray dashed higher and higher.  We climbed about the rocks and went down in some of the deep cold clefts into which the sun could seldom shine.  We gathered some wild-flowers; bits of pimpernel and one or two sprigs of fringed gentian which had bloomed late in a sheltered place, and a pale little bouquet of asters.  We sat for a long time looking off to sea, and we could talk or think of almost nothing beside what we had seen and heard at the farm-house.  We said how much we should like to go to that funeral, and we even made up our minds to go back in season, but we gave up the idea:  we had no right there, and it would seem as if we were merely curious, and we were afraid our presence would make the people ill at ease, the minister especially.  It would be an intrusion.

We spoke of the children, and tried to think what could be done for them:  we were afraid they would be told so many times that it was lucky they did not have to go to the poor-house, and yet we could not help pitying the hard-worked, discouraged woman whom we had seen, in spite of her bitterness.  Poor soul! she looked like a person to whom nobody had ever been very kind, and for whom life had no pleasures:  its sunshine had never been warm enough to thaw the ice at her heart.

We remembered how we knocked at the door and called loudly, but there had been no answer, and we wondered how we should have felt if we had gone farther into the room and had found the dead man in his coffin, all alone in the house.  We thought of our first visit, and what he had said to us, and we wished we had come again sooner, for we might have helped them so much more if we had only known.