KATHERINE died in May. She lay in her Empire bed draped with primrose silk, with her hair carefully marceled and dressed as usual. And the mortician had put a little—just a very little—rouge on her dead cheeks, so that she looked quite well and as if she were sleeping.
Naturally Henry, being Henry, saw that her departure on her long journey was attended by adequate ceremonial. Exactly the right people came, much as they had come to tea in happier times, the men in morning coats and dark ties, taking their silk hats carefully in with them for fear of damage in the hall; the women in rich dark clothes. From upstairs in her bedroom Kay could hear the rustlings and whispering, followed by the silence which meant the Bishop had taken his place on the stairs, and then strong and fullvoiced, reassuring, came his voice:
"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."
She could not cry. An hour or so before the service her father had gone into Katherine's bedroom and closed the door. It was not, she thought, that he had deliberately shut her out, but that he had forgotten her. Somewhere across the hall were Aunt Bessie, other and more distant relatives, the close friends. She sat in a chair and looked at her hands. They were very white once more, against her black frock.
"First thing you've got to do is to get those hands healed up."
Well, they were healed up now. But she must not think of that; not now, when her mother was dead, and downstairs they were committing her soul to God and her body to the soil. The soil. She herself had fought the soil, and it had beaten her.
