With that Sylvia crossed the room and the hall, and entered the parlor.  She closed the door behind her.  When she came out a few minutes later she was pale but triumphant.  “There,” said she, “it’s back with her, and I’ve got just this much to say, and no more, Flora Barnes.  When you get home you gather up all the back breadths you’ve got, and you do them up in a bundle, and you put them in that barrel the Ladies’ Sewing Society is going to send to the missionaries next week, and don’t you ever touch a back breadth again, or I’ll tell it right and left, and you’ll see how much business you’ll have left here, I don’t care how sickly it gets.”

“If father would—­only have joined the trust I never would have thought of such a thing, anyway,” muttered Flora.  She was vanquished.

“You do it, Flora Barnes.”

“Yes, I will.  Don’t speak so, Mrs. Whitman.”

“You had better.”

The undertaker and his son-in-law and Henry had remained quite silent.  Now they moved toward the door, and Flora followed, red and perspiring.  Sylvia heard her say something to her father about the trust on the way to the gate, between the tall borders of box, and heard Martin’s surly growl in response.

“Laying it onto the trust,” Sylvia said to Henry—­“such an awful thing as that!”

Henry assented.  He looked aghast at the whole affair.  He seemed to catch a glimpse of dreadful depths of feminity which daunted his masculine mind.  “To think of women caring enough about dress to do such a thing as that!” he said to himself.  He glanced at Sylvia, and she, as a woman, seemed entirely beyond his comprehension.

The whole great house was sweet with flowers.  Neighbors had sent the early spring flowers from their door-yards, and Henry and Sylvia had bought a magnificent wreath of white roses and carnations and smilax.  They had ordered it from a florist in Alford, and it seemed to them something stupendous—­as if in some way it must please even the dead woman herself to have her casket so graced.

“When folks know, they won’t think we didn’t do all we could,” Sylvia whispered to Henry, significantly.  He nodded.  Both were very busy, even with assistance from the neighbors, and a woman who worked out by the day, in preparing the house for the funeral.  Everything had to be swept and cleaned and dusted.

When the hour came, and the people began to gather, the house was veritably set in order and burnished.  Sylvia, in the parlor with the chief mourners, glanced about, and eyed the smooth lap of her new black gown with a certain complacency which she could not control.  After the funeral was over, and the distant relatives and neighbors who had assisted had eaten a cold supper and departed, and she and Henry were alone in the great house, she said, and he agreed, that everything had gone off beautifully.  “Just as she would have wished it if she could have been here and ordered it herself,” said Sylvia.