During the service Abel kept his eyes on Molly, who came leaning on Gay’s arm, and wearing what appeared to him a stifling amount of fashionable mourning.  He was too ignorant in such matters to discern that the fashion was one of an earlier date, or that the mourning had been hastily gathered from cedar chests by Kesiah.  The impression he seized and carried away was one of elegance and remoteness; and the little lonely figure in the midst of the green ridges bore no relation in his mind to the girl in the red jacket, who had responded so ardently to his kiss.  The sunlight falling in flecks through the network of locust boughs deepened the sense of unreality with which he watched her.

“It’s a good service as such ready-made things go,” observed Sarah as they went homeward, “but it seems to me that a man as upright as Reuben was is entitled to a sermon bein’ preached about him when he’s laid in his grave.  What’s the difference between the good man and the bad, if you’re goin’ to say the same words over the one and the other?  I ain’t a friend to flattery, but it can’t hurt a man to have a few compliments paid him in the churchyard, and when all’s said an’ done, ‘lookin’ for the general Resurrection’ can’t be construed into a personal compliment to Reuben.”

“When a man has been as pious as that he hasn’t any use for compliments, livin’ or dead,” rejoined Abner.

“Well, I ain’t contendin’,” replied his mother.  “The Lord knows thar ain’t any of his kind left, the mo’ ’s the pity!  Things have changed sence Reuben an’ I was young, an’ the very language Abel an’ Blossom speak is different from ours.  I reckon if old Mr. Jonathan was to ride along these roads to-day thar wouldn’t be anybody, unless it was a nigger, to open the gate for him.”

“You bet there wouldn’t!” exclaimed Abel with fervour.

Abner, walking at Sarah’s side, wore the unnerved and anxious expression of a man who is conscious that he is wearing his Sunday suit when it has grown too small to contain him.  His agony was so evident that Blossom, observing it in the midst of her sentimental disturbances, remarked affectionately that he looked as if he “were tired to death.”

“I’ve got the church fidgets in my legs,” he said.  “I reckon I’ll get into my everyday suit an’ finish that piece of ploughin’.  Are you goin’ back to the mill, Abel?”

“No, I’ve shut down for the day,” Abel replied.  The funeral had turned his mind into its Sunday habit of thought and he was determined that his present state of misery should extend reverently until the evening.  From some instinct, which he did not attempt to explain, it appeared more respectful to Reuben to sit idle for the rest of the day than to follow Abner’s example and go out and finish his work.

The next morning he decided to write Molly a letter, and as the ordinary paper his mother kept at the house seemed unsuitable for delivery at Jordan’s Journey, he walked down to the store to purchase a few sheets from Mrs. Bottoms.