Unconsciously to himself his voice when he spoke again had lost its ring of conviction.

“Perhaps I may see her later?” he repeated.

“The funeral will be to-morrow.  You will be there?”

“Yes, I’ll be there,” he replied; and then because there was nothing further for him to say, he bowed over his hat, and went down the flagged walk to the orchard, where the bluebirds were still singing.  His misery appeared to him colossal—­of a size that overshadowed not only the spring landscape, but life itself.  He tried to remember a time when he was happy, but this was beyond the stretch of his imagination at the moment, and it seemed to him that he had plodded on year after year with a leaden weight oppressing his heart.

“I might have known it would be like this,” he was thinking.  “First, I wanted the mill, so I’d lie awake at night about it, and then when I got it all the machinery was worn out.  It’s always that way and always will be, I reckon.”  And it appeared to him that this terrible law of incompleteness lay like a blight over the over the whole field of human endeavour.  He saw Molly, fair and fitting as she had been yesterday after the quarrel, and he told himself passionately that he wanted her too much ever to win her.  On the ground by the brook he saw the spray of last year’s golden-rod, and the sight brought her back to him with a vividness that set his pulses drumming.  In his heart he cursed Mr. Jonathan’s atonement more fervently than he had ever cursed his sin.

The next day he went to Reuben’s funeral, with his mother and Blossom at his side, walking slowly across the moist fields, in which the vivid green of the spring showed like patches of velvet on a garment of dingy cloth.  In front of him his mother moved stiffly in her widow’s weeds, which she still wore on occasions of ceremony, and in spite of her sincere sorrow for Reuben she cast a sharp eye more than once on the hem of her alpaca skirt, which showed a brown stain where she had allowed it to drag in a forgetful moment.  Only Archie was absent, but that was merely because he had driven over to bring one of the Halloween girls in Abel’s gig.  Sarah had heard him whistling in the stable at daybreak, and looking out of the window a little later she had seen him oiling the wheels of the vehicle.  It had been decided at supper the evening before that the family as a unit should pay its respects to Reuben.  From Sarah, comforting herself behind her widow’s weeds with the doctrine of original sin, to Archie, eager to give his sweetheart a drive, one and all had been moved by a genuine impulse to dignify as far as lay in their power the ceremonial of decay.  Even Abner, the silent, had remarked that he’d “never heard a word said against Reuben Merryweather in his life.”  And now at the end of that life the neighbours had gathered amid the ridges of green graves in the churchyard to bear witness to the removal of a good man from a place in which he had been honoured.