Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/168

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hurried rite that marked the passing of the last. She kept seeing those first fanatical, hard-faced, rugged Puritans standing above their tombs like ghosts watching ironically the genteel figure of the Apostle to the Genteel and his jeweled Prayer Book. . . .

The Polish grave-diggers set about their work stolidly indifferent to the storm, and before the first motor had started down the steep and stony path, the rain came with a wild, insane violence, sweeping inward in a wall across the sea and the black marshes. Sabine, at the door of her motor, raised her head and breathed deeply, as if the savage, destructive force of the storm filled her with a kind of ecstasy.

On the following day, cool after the storm and bright and clear, a second procession made its way up the stony path to the top of the bald hill, only this time Bishop Smallwood was not there, nor Cousin Struthers Pentland, for they had both been called away suddenly and mysteriously. And Anson Pentland was not there because he would have nothing to do with a blackguard like Horace Pentland, even in death. In the little group about the open grave stood Olivia and John Pentland and Aunt Cassie, who had come because, after all, the dead man's name was Pentland, and Miss Haddon, (in her heavy broadcloth cape), who never missed any funeral and had learned about this one from her friend, the undertaker, who kept her perpetually au courant. There were not even any friends to carry the coffin to the grave, and so this labor was divided between the undertaker's men and the grave-diggers. . . .

And the service began again, read this time by the rector,