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Monday was the day set for the burial. Early in the morning old Thomas Merriam walked feebly up the road to the Squire’s house. People noticed him as he passed. “How terribly fast he’s grown old lately!” they said. He opened the gate which led into the Squire’s front yard with fumbling fingers, and went up the walk to the front door, under the Corinthian pillars, and raised the brass knocker.

Evelina opened the door, and started and blushed when she saw him. She had been crying; there were red rings around her blue eyes, and her pretty lips were swollen. She tried to smile at Thomas’s father, and she held out her hand with shy welcome.

“I want to see her,” the old man said, abruptly.

Evelina started, and looked at him wonderingly. “I–don’t believe–I know who you mean,” said she. “Do you want to see Mrs. Loomis?”

“No; I want to see her.”

“Her?”

“Yes, her.”

Evelina turned pale as she stared at him. There was something strange about his face. “But–Cousin Evelina,” she faltered–“she–didn’t want– Perhaps you don’t know: she left special directions that nobody was to look at her.”

“I want to see her,” said the old man, and Evelina gave way. She stood aside for him to enter, and led him into the great north parlor, where Evelina Adams lay in her mournful state. The shutters were closed, and one on entering could distinguish nothing but that long black shadow in the middle of the room. Young Evelina opened a shutter a little way, and a slanting shaft of spring sunlight came in and shot athwart the coffin. The old man tiptoed up and leaned over and looked at the dead woman. Evelina Adams had left further instructions about her funeral, which no one understood, but which were faithfully carried out. She wished, she had said, to be attired for her long sleep in a certain rose-colored gown, laid away in rose leaves and lavender in a certain chest in a certain chamber. There were also silken hose and satin shoes with it, and these were to be put on, and a wrought lace tucker fastened with a pearl brooch.

It was the costume she had worn one Sabbath day back in her youth, when she had looked across the meeting-house and her eyes had met young Thomas Merriam’s; but nobody knew nor remembered; even young Evelina thought it was simply a vagary of her dead cousin’s.

“It don’t seem to me decent to lay away anybody dressed so,” said Mrs. Martha Loomis; “but of course last wishes must be respected.”

The two Loomis girls said they were thankful nobody was to see the departed in her rose-colored shroud.

Even old Thomas Merriam, leaning over poor Evelina, cold and dead in the garb of her youth, did not remember it, and saw no meaning in it. He looked at her long. The beautiful color was all faded out of the yellow-white face; the sweet full lips were set and thin; the closed blue eyes sunken in dark hollows; the yellow hair showed a line of gray at the edge of her old woman’s cap, and thin gray curls lay against the hollow cheeks. But old Thomas Merriam drew a long breath when he looked at her. It was like a gasp of admiration and wonder; a strange rapture came into his dim eyes; his lips moved as if he whispered to her, but young Evelina could not hear a sound. She watched him, half frightened, but finally he turned to her. “I ‘ain’t seen her–fairly,” said he, hoarsely–“I ‘ain’t seen her, savin’ a glimpse of her at the window, for over forty year, and she ‘ain’t changed, not a look. I’d have known her anywheres. She’s the same as she was when she was a girl. It’s wonderful–wonderful!”

Young Evelina shrank a little. “We think she looks natural,” she said, hesitatingly.

“She looks jest as she did when she was a girl and used to come into the meetin’-house. She is jest the same,” the old man repeated, in his eager, hoarse voice. Then he bent over the coffin, and his lips moved again. Young Evelina would have called Mrs. Loomis, for she was frightened, had he not been Thomas’s father, and had it not been for her vague feeling that there might be some old story to explain this which she had never heard. “Maybe he was in love with poor Cousin Evelina, as Thomas is with me,” thought young Evelina, using her own leaping-pole of love to land straight at the truth. But she never told her surmise to any one except Thomas, and that was long afterwards, when the old man was dead. Now she watched him with her blue dilated eyes. But soon he turned away from the coffin and made his way straight out of the room, without a word. Evelina followed him through the entry and opened the outer door. He turned on the threshold and looked back at her, his face working.