What a fool I have become!"

In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by the
stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the false
teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his head upon
the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand of Jane
McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped over and
kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the doorway bearing
the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to his lips,
commanded silence.




CHAPTER VIII


The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He thought
that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become coarsened--she
looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had an air of having
quarrelled with her husband when they came out of their bedroom in the
morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the parlour, astonished and
irritated by the endless number of women that crowded into the house. They
were everywhere, in the kitchen, the sleeping room back of the parlour;
and in the parlour, where the dead woman lay in her coffin, they were
massed. When the thin-lipped minister, holding a book in his hand, held
forth upon the virtues of the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the
floor and thought that thus they would have wept over the body of the dead
Windy, had his fingers but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister
would have talked in the same way--blatantly and without knowledge--of the