untouched till the rest of the house was finished and ready for her.
They also had the garden-door repaired to give her ingress, and the
gallery-gate taken away. These same sons who for so many years had never
come near their mother, seemed now very anxious to attend to her every
wish; scarcely a shrub was cut down in the garden excepting in the
presence of one of them, and when Mrs. Peter Melcombe especially begged
that the grandmother's wish respecting the bed of lilies might be
attended to, Mr. Mortimer, with evident emotion, gave orders to the
gardener that it should not be touched.

And then Sunday came, and with it a trial that the two sons had not
expected. It was announced by the churchwarden to the family, first to
the ladies at the hall, and then to the gentlemen at the inn, that Mr.
Craik was going to preach a funeral sermon. He did not wish, he said, to
take them by surprise--he felt that they would wish to know. In his
secret soul he believed that the old men would not come to hear it--he
hoped they would not, because their absence would enable him more freely
to speak of the misfortunes of the deceased.

But they did come. The manner of their coming was thought by the
congregation to be an acknowledgment that they felt their fault. They
did not look any one in the face; but with brows bent down, and eyes on
the ground, they went to the places given them in the family pew, and
when morning prayers were over and the text was given out, as still as
stones they sat and listened.

"Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like
his."

The sermon was more full of eulogy than was in good taste, but the