The time was so deliberate that I could fix my attention on nothing save the knocking at our kitchen door and even my desire for what the telegraph boy would bring became vague. My necessity was so pressing that several times I was sure I heard my mother call to me. At last, indeed, I did hear her, and I ran out. As I crossed the yard I heard, like an insistent warning, the long-held note of a foghorn which was answered on the other side of the tongue of land by another, the two echoing and re-echoing. Then they subsided and there was a silence until a still more remote bleat sounded up the coast.

My mother was smiling radiantly and I smiled in response, sure the telegram had arrived. “It’s all right, darling,” she said. “You sit down and I’ll tell you about it.”

I glanced round the room for a yellow envelope, but I saw none. I observed that my mother had laid aside Ivan’s nightshirt and was now making a basket in cross-stitch on a pot-holder.

“We have been stupid,” she said. “Why, Sonie girl, the thing to do is to give our little boy an ocean burial the way the sailors do.”

“In the water, do you mean, Mamma?” I cried.

“Yes. It’s clean out there, and, oh, so much better than to be buried like a poor person!” She leaned forward eagerly and took my hand, saying in a whisper, “After dark, we can go tonight. No one will see us.”

“But we would have to have a boat. Oh, no! No, Mamma, I can’t bury little Ivan that way.”

She tried to persuade me. Softly and affectionately, she described the dignity of such an act, told me how the bells and the waves would be eternal mourners for the little boy. She said the strange things that grew at the bottom of the sea would be fine flowers for his grave. If we must go out in a boat, would not Mr. Henderson take us? We three would go out, dressed in black, early in the evening. It would be ever so much nicer even than the cast-iron flowers.

Hearing once again the inconsolable moan of the foghorns, I was almost won but I did not speak.

“You run ask Mrs. Henderson,” she coaxed, “and then go to the man who took him away. You fix it for me, sweetheart.”

Mrs. Henderson had toward the sea the animadversion common to all the wives of Chichester mariners and fishermen. She personified it as a treacherous siren, forever discontent with her partial government over the men and striving with all manner of clever devices like storms and fog, to win full sovereignty over them. Thus, when I told her of my mother’s proposal her bland face was disordered with revulsion. She recovered her voice and told me she was very sure so irregular a procedure was quite illegal, but as she was by no means an authority, we would go together to inquire of Mr. Greeley, and we set out through the fog.