The coffin, sloping as it passed down the front steps, slowly moved out of the house. Then Neil first understood how final was death. This was the last time when his father would ever use these steps, up and down which he had trotted, so fussily, so happily, for so many years; and on this last passage, he could not go by himself. He had to be carried, and he could not look back at the house one last time.

Hearth ushered them to their proper places in the funeral cars, in a complicated order of court precedence as though Death were a monarch touchy and demanding of propriety. There were words between Alice Whittick Kingsblood and Kitty Kingsblood Sayward as to which of them ought to sit with Mother. Robert Hearth solved it soothingly, with a brisk bland piety that said, This too shall pass away and you will be surprised and gratified by the reasonableness of my bill.

The cars, when they started, all had their lights on, to indicate that this was a funeral. It was by state law an offense punishable by fine to cross the line of the procession, lest Dr. Kenneth’s feelings be hurt.

Then the coffin was swaying up the steps into the Sylvan Park Baptist Church, and Dr. Shelley Buncer, in Geneva gown, was waiting as though he had never played rummy, but always in shadowy cloisters had meditated upon the resurrection. His sermon was consoling, and he promised all of them that they would soon see their friend again, but he did not seem excited about it.

Neil wondered again at the strangers who had come to mourn his father. Who were they all? Patients? Perhaps some of them knew his father better than he did now. He felt lonely, and suddenly Vestal’s intelligent hand was reassuring him.

He realized how many were staring at him rather than at the pastor; he remembered that to half of them he was a masquerading black man who had been caught and was going to be driven out of town. Then he noticed two unexpected guests whose eyes, as they sat in the back row, tried to tell him their enduring friendship—Evan Brewster, and Dr. Emerson Woolcape, a fellow-dentist to whom Dr. Kenneth had never spoken.

* * * * *

It was cold at the grave, out at Forest Lawn Cemetery on Ottawa Heights, and over the shivering few who had stayed, Dr. Buncer’s brave words seemed to hang and tremble like gray snowflakes.

Then they all turned away and left his father there alone.

* * * * *

When they were home, the Vestal who had been so patient became sharp.