Pretty soon there were voices outside and steps on the path.  The door opened, and two women came in.  One was Paulina Maria, Adoniram Judd’s wife; the other was Belinda, the wife of Ozias Lamb.

Belinda Lamb spoke first.  She was a middle-aged woman, with a pretty faded face.  She wore her light hair in curls, which fell over her delicate, thin cheeks, and her blue eyes had no more experience in them than a child’s, although they were reddened now with gentle tears.  She had the look of a young girl who had been out like a flower in too strong a light, and faded out her pretty tints, but was a young girl still.  Belinda always smiled an innocent girlish simper, which sometimes so irritated the austere New England village women that they scowled involuntarily back at her.  Paulina Maria Judd and Ann Edwards both scowled without knowing it now as she spoke, her words never seeming to disturb that mildly ingratiating upward curve of her lips.

“I’ve come right over,” said she, in a soft voice; “but it ain’t true what Henry said, is it?”

“What ain’t true?” asked Ann, grimly.

“It ain’t true you’re goin’ to have a funeral?” Tears welled up afresh in Belinda’s blue eyes, and flowed slowly down her delicate cheeks, but not a muscle of her face changed, and she smiled still.

“Why can’t I have a funeral?”

“Why, Ann, how can you have a funeral, when there ain’t—­when they ’ain’t found him?”

“I’d like to know why I can’t!”

Belinda’s blue, weeping eyes surveyed her with the helpless bewilderment of a baby.  “Why, Ann,” she gasped, “there won’t be any—­remains!”

“What of that?  I guess I know it.”

“There won’t be nothin’ for anybody to go round an’ look at; there won’t be any coffin—­Ann, you ain’t goin’ to have any coffin when he ain’t found, be you?”

“Be you a fool, Belindy Lamb?” said Ann.  A hard sniff came from Paulina Maria.

“Well, I didn’t s’pose you was,” said Belinda, with meek abashedness.  “Of course I knew you wasn’t—­I only asked; but I don’t see how you can have a funeral no way, Ann.  There won’t be any coffin, nor any hearse, nor any procession, nor—­”

“There’ll be mourners,” broke in Ann.

“They’re what makes a funeral,” said Paulina Maria, putting on an apron she had brought.  “Folks that’s had funerals knows.”

She cast an austere glance at Belinda Lamb, who colored to the roots of her fair curls, and was conscious of a guilty lack of funeral experience, while Paulina Maria had lost seven children, who all died in infancy.  Poor Belinda seemed to see the other woman’s sternly melancholy face in a halo of little coffins and funeral wreaths.

“I know you’ve had a good deal more to contend with than I have,” she faltered.  “I ’ain’t never lost anybody till poor—­Abel.”  She broke into gentle weeping, but Paulina Maria thrust a broom relentlessly into her hand.