The two women stayed next day and assisted in preparations for the funeral.  Deborah seemed to have no thought for any of her household duties.  She stayed in her bedroom most of the time, and her praying voice could be heard at intervals.

Some other women came in, and they went about with silent efficiency, performing their services to the dead and setting the house in order; but they said very little to Deborah.  When she came out of her room they eyed her with a certain grim furtiveness, and they never said a word to her about Ephraim.

It was already known all over the village that she had been whipping Ephraim when he died.  Poor old Caleb, when the neighbors had come flocking in, had kept repeating with childish sobs, “Mother hadn’t ought to have whipped him! mother hadn’t ought to have whipped him!”

“Did Mrs. Thayer whip that boy?” the doctor had questioned, sharply, before all the women, and Caleb had sobbed back, hoarsely, “She was jest a-whippin’ of him; I told her she hadn’t ought to.”

That had been enough.  “She whipped him,” the women repeated to each other in shocked pantomime.  They all knew how corporal punishment had been tabooed for Ephraim.

The Thayer house was crowded the afternoon of the funeral.  The decent black-clad village people, with reddening eyes and mouths drooping with melancholy, came in throngs into the snowy yard.  The men in their Sunday gear tiptoed creaking across the floors; the women, feeling for their pocket-handkerchiefs, padded softly and heavily after them, folded in their black shawls like mourning birds.

[Illustration:  “The Thayer house was crowded the afternoon of the funeral”]

Caleb and Deborah and Barney sat in the north parlor, where Ephraim lay.  Deborah’s hoarse laments, which were not like the ordinary hysterical demonstrations of feminine grief, being rather a stern uprising and clamor of herself against her own heart, filled the house.

The minister had to pray and speak against it; scarcely any one beyond the mourners’ room could hear his voice.  It was a hard task that the poor young minister had.  He was quite aware of the feeling against Deborah, and it required finesse to avoid jarring that, and yet display the proper amount of Christian sympathy for the afflicted.  Then there were other difficulties.  The minister had prayed in his closet for a small share of the wisdom of Solomon before setting forth.

The people in the other rooms leaned forward and strained their ears.  The minister’s wife sat beside her husband with bright spots of color in her cheeks, her little figure nervously contracted in her chair.  They had had a discussion concerning the advisability of his mentioning the sister and daughter in his prayer, and she had pleaded with him strenuously that he should not.