A change had come over Sarah Henderson which alarmed her father and herself, and indeed her whole family, and which had begun shortly after Ivan’s first fit. Whether the shock of what she had seen that night wakened what had been merely dormant, or whether her strangeness would have come about anyhow, I cannot say. At any rate, she had begun to walk in her sleep, and while she never wandered farther than the back porch, she was in dread lest she should walk down to the sea and be drowned before she could master herself. She had headaches and bad dreams and she was ill-humored. Mrs. Henderson thought new glasses would cure her headaches, and that her bad dreams came from eating indigestible sandwiches and pickles before she went to bed. And if Sarah would take a little more exercise, her disposition would improve. She had been out of school for several years and had never been able to find work; she had no talents, no interests, and no beaux. Mrs. Henderson said, “You’re bound to get notions if you’re idle.”

But Mr. Henderson blamed Ivan. He also blamed his wife who, he thought, in going so often to our house, brought back with her some contagious and powerful virus. At last he saw nothing for it but to move away and had got a job in Maine. He was already making his preparations, and this morning in the store he had piled up several pasteboard cartons. Now I have no doubt that we did not drive him away and that the removal to Maine promised the family far more than they had ever had in Chichester. But my self-consciousness dyed everything to match its own color, and for a long time I believed that I had uprooted Mr. Henderson and had unbalanced Sarah.

The villagers recovered their voices as I stepped away from the counter with my matches. As though by way of apology to me for their silence or to indicate that they had not yet heard the news, they began to talk of things which bore no relation to the death. They commented on the fog and listed its attendant injuries to motorists and mariners, and they prophesied the immediate ruin of the United States under its existing government, exchanged receipts for salt-rising bread, and told jokes involving a judge and a colored man named Rastus. But the lively tone was betrayed by a slackening of pace as I went down the aisle toward the door, feeling the eyes of everyone upon me.

And yet, when I had been at home only a few minutes, the flowers began to arrive and the notes, composed laboriously in an embarrassment that concealed itself behind phrases like “the dear departed” and “passed on to a better world,” so that I thought I had misconstrued the silence in the store, for the names of some of the people who had been there were on the cards.