"She makes a beautiful corpse," she said, in a hissing whisper.

Henry Whitman and his wife were in the room, with Martin Barnes and
Simeon Capen, his son-in-law. Barnes and Capen rose at once with
pleased interest, Henry and Sylvia more slowly; yet they also had
expressions of pleasure, albeit restrained. Both strove to draw their
faces down, yet that expression of pleasure reigned triumphant,
overcoming the play of the facial muscles. They glanced at each
other, and each saw an angry shame in the other's eyes because of
this joy.

But when they followed Martin Barnes and his assistants into the
parlor, where Abrahama White was laid in state, all the shameful joy
passed from their faces. The old woman in her last bed was majestic.
The dead face was grand, compelling to other than earthly
considerations. Henry and Sylvia forgot the dead woman's little store
which she had left behind her. Sylvia leaned over her and wept;
Henry's face worked. Nobody except himself had ever known it, but he,
although much younger, had had his dreams about the beautiful
Abrahama White. He remembered them as he looked at her, old and dead
and majestic, with something like the light of her lost beauty in her
still face. It was like a rose which has fallen in such a windless
atmosphere that its petals retain the places which they have held
around its heart.

Henry loved his wife, but this before him was associated with
something beyond love, which tended to increase rather than diminish
it. When at last they left the room he did what was very unusual with
him. He was reticent, like the ordinary middle-aged New-Englander. He