Marion broke down, and sobbed, with her head bowed to her knees as she sat.

Ray sat perfectly still.  She longed to beg her not to think about it, not to say any more; but she knew she would feel better if she did.

“I told her I’d go presently; and she waited—­the patient little thing!  And I was making my blue bow, and fixing it on, and fussing with the running, and I forgot!  And she couldn’t bear to bother me, and didn’t say a word, but waited till she dropped to sleep without it; and her lips were so red and dry.  It was a whole hour that I let her lie so.  She never knew anything after that.

“She waked up all in a rave of light-headedness!

“I thought I should never get over it, Ray.  And I never did, way down in my heart; but I got back into the same wretched nonsense, and now—­here’s mother!

“It’s no use to tell me.  I’ve done it.  I’ve lost my right.  It’ll never be given back to me.”

“Marion—­I wish you could have Mr. Vireo to talk to you; or Luclarion Grapp.  Won’t you come home with me, and let them come to see you?  They know about these things, dear.”

“Would you take me home?” asked Marion, slowly, looking her in the face.

“Yes, indeed.  Will you come?”

“O, do take me and hide me away, and let me cry!”

She dropped herself, as it were passively, into Rachel Ingraham’s hands.  She could not stay among the neighbors, she said.  She could not stay in that house alone, one day.

Ray stayed with her, until after the funeral.

Marion would not go to the church.  She had let them decide everything just as they pleased, thinking only that she could not think about any of it.  Mrs. Kent had been a faithful, humble church-member for forty years, and the minister and her fellow-members wanted her to be brought there.  There was no room in the little half-house, where she had lived, for neighbors and friends to gather, and for the services properly to take place.

So it was decided.

But when the time came, and it was too late to change, Marion said,—­“She belonged to them, and they have done by her.  They can all go, but I can’t.  To sit up in the front pew as a mourner, and be looked at, and prayed for, as if I had been a real child, and had only lost my mother!  You know I can’t, Ray.  I will stay here, and bear my punishment.  May be if I bear it all now—­do you believe it might make any difference?”

Ray stayed with her through the whole.

While all was still in the church, not ten rods off, a carriage came for them to the little white gate.  With the silken blinds down, and the windows open behind them, it was driven to the cemetery, and in beneath the sheltering trees, to a stopping place just upon a little side turn, near the newly opened grave.  No one, of those who alighted from the vehicles of the short procession, knew exactly when or how it had come.