Presently he was at the familiar front gate and his father, looking unusual, somehow, came to lift him down.

“See my shell I found at Grammer’s!”

“Your mother is dead.”

“See my shell I found at Grammer’s!”

“Your mother is dead.”

It was the sinister iteration by which he was stricken, rather than the news itself.  The latter only stunned.  His hand in his father’s, he went up the walk and into the house.  There were women inside, women who moved with an effect of bustling stillness, the same women who had so often asked him what his name was.  They seemed to know it well enough now.  He was aware that his entrance created no little sensation.  One of them kissed him and told him not to cry, but he had no thought of crying.  He became aware of the thing in his hands.

“See my shell I found at Grammer’s!”

The invitation was a general one.  They looked in silence and some of them moved about, and then through a doorway he saw in the next room an object long and dark and shining set on two chairs.

He had never seen anything like it, but its suggestion was evil.  The women waited.  Something seemed to be expected of some one.  His father led him into that room and lifted him up to see.  His mother’s face was there under a glass.  He could see that she wore her pretty blue dress, and on one arm beside her was something covered with white.  He called softly to her.

“Mamma!  Mamma!”

But she did not open her eyes.

Then he was out again where the people were, and the people seemed to forget about him.  He went to his little room under the sloping roof.  He had not let go of the shell and now, in the fading light from the low window, he lost himself once more in its depths.  Inwardly he knew that a terror lurked near, but he had not yet felt it.  Only when bedtime came did the continued silence of his mother become meaningful.  When he was left alone, he cried for her, still clutching his shell.

The minister came the next day, and many people, and the minister talked to them about his mother.  The two Uncle Bunkers were there, grim, hard-mouthed, glaring, for they hated each other as only brothers can hate.  He wondered if they would still let him be partly a Bunker, now that his mother was gone.  He wondered also at the novel consideration he saw being shown to his father.  Dressed in a new suit of black, with an unaccustomed black hat, his father was plainly become a man of importance.  He was one apart, and people of undoubted consequence deferred to him—­to the very last.  He earnestly wished his mother could see that; his nervous little mother with the flushed face and tired eyes, always terrifically concerned about one small matter or another.  He thought she would have liked to see that his father was some one, after all.

II