“It’s nothing, my dear, nothing at all,” and he grasped my arm again before I could escape our hollow ball and get into another where I was alone. When I had gone some yards beyond him, I heard him call, “Morgan, is it, or Martin? What the devil is the name again?” But I did not answer.

My mother was embroidering when I got home. Upon the chest of Ivan’s outing-flannel nightshirt, she had made an enormous rose in black cotton and was now sketching a wreath of smaller roses to encircle it.

“The shroud,” she explained.

I would have snatched my brother’s pitiful nightshirt from her hands, but I knew, by the diligence with which she bent over her work, that if I did, I would be subjected to an endless tirade. I only said, “Listen, Mamma, you mustn’t count too much on the funeral.”

She looked up innocently. “But you promised the cast-iron roses, darling! Why, Sonia, I wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to make the shroud if you hadn’t promised me!”

“Mamma . . .” I began, but words were useless. I drew a chair to the fire and sat brooding, my eyes fixed upon the oven door where the word “Enterprise” was elaborately printed in blue. “For God’s sake, Miss Pride, help me,” I thought. “If she doesn’t get the cast-iron roses, what will I do?”

•

The fog continued into the next day so that when we got up, it was only the clock, not the appearance of the world, that told us it was morning. From six until noon, I waited for the telegram. I was no longer ashamed of my letter. I was conscious of nothing but the hours ascending to their climax, three o’clock, which was the hour Mr. Greeley had told me he would “dispose” of the body. One of the hours dragged by so slowly that each second of it was a lifetime, but the next was swiftly gone. Because, in my impatience for the message, I could not bear my mother’s humming and smiling as she patiently filled in those gruesome black roses, I had gone to the shop soon after breakfast where I fidgeted with the playing cards and dreamed over Ethan Frome. Each time I heard a voice calling another name, not mine, I bent my head over my desk and closed my eyes in a total blankness of disappointment. Hopestill Mather’s time-blackened slippers, which had remained all these years where I had put them on the day my father went away, infuriated me as they had not done in a long while. I would have slashed to ribbons what was left of them if my father’s tools had not been rusted beyond use. Now, at this very moment, when grief and terror were consuming me, Hopestill was probably laughing, with her handsome head flung back, her bright mind far from death or poverty. What would she do, I wondered, on a slow, gray day like this? She would still be in bed, under a light green eiderdown. Or perhaps she was having her breakfast on a tray and in a little while would lazily get out of bed for a long, perfumed bath. Why, her allowance for a month would pay for my brother’s headstone!