There was a box of wooden matches on the mantelpiece next to a framed photograph of John on the day of his ordination. Hubert avoided looking at the photograph. It was her morbid insistence on unhappiness that had caused her to put it there when she had another copy of it in a similar frame upstairs in the bedroom, and it wasn’t a good likeness anyway and he intended one day to take it down and hide it. He struck a match and bent down and lighted the gas with great care and adjusted it by turning the tap slowly and pressing his lips together with the effort. Then he went to his chair and took up the newspaper and sat down. He did not open the newspaper. He sat quietly and watched the pale rose of warmth spread over the ashen grill in the grate. He sat like that until Rose called him to tea, and then he stood up out of his chair and buttoned his cardigan and pulled it down around his body and went to join her in the kitchen. As he went, the words of their conversation about the hyacinth came back to him, and he smiled, thinking that in spite of the habitual apology in her voice she had been half smiling as she explained to him about the difficulty of getting spring flowers when it was not spring. Even poor Rose could not shoulder all the blame for the change in the seasons.

In the kitchen the tea was laid out on the table and Rose was standing up pouring the tea. He used to try to get her to leave the teapot on the table so that she wouldn’t be jumping up and down every five minutes, but she insisted on leaving it on the stove where the tea would keep hot. He pulled out one of the old yellow chairs and sat down, and in a minute she joined him, taking the chair across from him. In the middle of the meal he remembered the funeral and he told Rose about it, and she went up to the sitting room to get the newspaper to see if they could discover who it was had been buried with such pomp. While she was about it she collected the morning newspaper and the newspapers of the last three mornings in case they would have more information. She had a fairly good idea of whose funeral Hubert had seen — a wholesale grocer named Kinsella, whose father had come from Cork with nothing and built up a good business — but she didn’t want to say the name aloud to Hubert until she was certain.