Mabel did not join in the desultory talk that engaged the others until supper-time.  There was a broken string in her heart, that jangled painfully when touched by an incautious hand.

“Twelve years old!” she was saying, inwardly.  “My darling would have been thirteen, had she lived!”

And then flitted before her fancy a girlish form, with pure, loving eyes, and a voice melodious as a mocking-bird’s.  Warm arms were about her neck, and a round, soft cheek laid against hers—­as no human arms and face would ever caress her—­her, the childless, whose had been the hopes, fears, pains—­never the recompence of maternity.

She had been to the graveyard that day—­secretly, lest her husband should frown, Clara wonder, and Winston sneer at her love for and memory of that which had never existed, according to their rendering of the term.  She had trimmed the wire-grass out of the little hollow, above which the mound had not been renewed since the day of her baby’s burial, and, trusting to the infrequency of others’ visits to the neglected enclosure, had laid a bunch of white rose-buds over the unmarked dust she accounted still a part of her heart, ’neath which it had lain so long.  People said she had never been a mother; never had had a living child; had no hope of seeing it in heaven.  God and she knew better.

“Clara, I wish you to attend Mrs. Tazewell’s funeral this afternoon,” said Mr. Aylett at breakfast the next day but one after this.  “There were invidious remarks made upon your non-appearance at her daughter’s, and I do not choose that my family shall furnish food for neighborhood scandal.”

“My dear Winston, you must recollect what an insufferable headache I had that day.”

“Don’t have one to-day,” ordered her husband laconically.  “Mabel, do you care to go?”

“By all means.  I would not fail, even in seeming, in rendering respect to one I used to like so much, and whose kindness to me was unvarying.  You have no objection, Herbert?”

“None.  I may accompany you—­the day being fine, and the roads in tolerable order.”

The funeral was conducted with the disregard of what are, in other regions, established customs that distinguish such occasions in the rural districts of Virginia.

Written notices had been sent out, far and near, the day before, announcing that the services would begin at two o’clock, but when the Aylett party arrived at a quarter of an hour before the time specified, there was no appearance of regular exercises of any kind.  A dozen carriges besides theirs were clustered about the front gate, and a long line of saddle-horses tethered to the fence.  Knots of gentlemen in riding costume dotted the lawn and porches, and within-doors ladies sat, or walked at their ease in the parlor and dining room, or gathered in silent tearfulness around the open coffin in the wide central hall.

The bed-room of the deceased was a roomy apartment in a wing of the building, and to this Mabel was summoned before she could seat herself elsewhere.