They all turned to watch the four young men and their burden out through the open doors. They waited like people who have said a final good-bye and watched a living person go away forever, at loose ends, not knowing how themselves to get up and go, to break the spell.

The snuffing out of the four candles touched Grace Kimlock like a cold wind. She got quickly up and went out as if she were being driven out. How strange to feel the icy October air outside, how strange too and lost she was, afraid to be seen with the tears streaming down her cheeks, running wildly to a taxi alone.

It was so utterly finished for Edward and so utterly unfinished for her, abandoned, wholly abandoned here as if in a strange city, with nowhere to go, she felt—for her own house had become like an asylum to hold madness and inconsolable grief.

“Where to, ma’am?” the driver asked patiently.

“I don’t know, anywhere—just drive along the river for a while.”

She felt cut off, felt that if perhaps they could have followed the body to the cemetery, seen the earth cast upon it, then she would not have suffered like this, such utter and frightful isolation. But by now the coffin was halfway to the train and would travel miles and miles before it was laid to rest beside Edward’s mother in Medfield. They were driving under her beloved plane trees now, little yellowish leaves swept up into the gutters and the river leaden gray, ruffled by the wind, past the bridges, the white and red Harvard Houses. The familiar sights were soothing, the boy in a scull alone was soothing—she sat up and leaned at the window to watch him, blowing her nose—the relief it was, after stifling her tears, the relief of being able to make the comfortable blowing noise!

“Whose funeral was it, ma’am?” the driver, sensitive to her change of mood, asked now.

“Professor Cavan.”

“The guy who jumped under a subway train the other day?”

“Yes.”

“Gee,” said the driver, “tough going …”

He was a fat middle-aged man, she noticed, with many wrinkles round his eyes. He looked kind and rather tired and easy-going, and she thought how restful it is to talk to a stranger when one is desperate, restful because one is not responsible and nothing one says matters.

“I go past those buildings every day—Harvard,” he said, “and think about all the rich boys up there, studying, learning everything, rowing on the river, taking their time.” He laughed a slightly self-conscious laugh. “I never even finished grade school myself. Funny that one of them, a professor, you say, would get desperate. He must have been in a bad way. He was rich too, by what I read in the paper. You’d think he could have taken a vacation——”