Silver Bush was made ready to receive death. Judy lay in state in the Big Parlor…Pat had a queer feeling that it should really have been in the kitchen…while outside great flakes of the first snowfall were coming down. Her busy hands were still, quite still, at last. Beautiful flowers had been sent in, but Pat searched her garden and found a few late ’mums and some crimson leaves and berries to put in Judy’s hands, folded on the breast of her blue dress-up dress. Judy’s face took on a beauty and dignity in death it had never known in life. The funeral was largely attended…Pat couldn’t help feeling that Judy would have been proud of it. And then it was over…the house, so terribly still, to be put in order and no Judy to talk it over with in the kitchen afterwards! Pat reflected, with a horrible choke, how Judy would have enjoyed talking over her own funeral…how she would have chuckled over the jokes. For there had been jokes…it seemed that there were jokes everywhere, even at funerals. Old Malcolm Anderson making one of his rare remarks as he looked down on Judy’s dead face, “Poor woman, I hope you’re as happy as you look,” …mournfully, as if he rather doubted it; and Olive’s son yowling because his sisters pushed him away from the window and he couldn’t see the flowers being carried out…“Never mind,” one of his sisters comforting him, “you’ll see the flowers at mother’s funeral.”

When all was done, Pat, wondering how she could bear the dull, dead ache in her heart, averted her eyes from the spectral winter landscape and went to the kitchen expecting to find it a tragedy of emptiness. But mother was there in Judy’s place, with a chairful of cats beside her. Pat buried her head in mother’s lap and cried out all the tears she had wanted to cry out since Judy was stricken down.

“Oh, mother…mother…I’ve nothing but you and Silver Bush left now.”

THE ELEVENTH YEAR

CHAPTER 53

There were many times in the year following Judy’s death when cold waves of pain went over Pat. At first it seemed literally impossible to carry on without Judy. Life seemed very savorless now that Judy’s tales were all told. But Pat found, as others have done, that “we forget because we must.” Life began to be livable again and then sweet. Silver Bush seemed to cry to her, “Make me home-like again…keep my rooms lighted…my heart warmed. Bring young laughter here to keep me from growing old.”

Almost every one she had loved was changed or gone…the old voices of gladness sounded no more…but Silver Bush was still the same.