They did everything that it was possible for two men to do under the circumstances. They filled the old house with flowers, until it seemed like one great garden of bloom, and the coffin they ordered would hardly have shamed a duke, while the undertaker had orders to send Bessie only a very small part of the real cost of the funeral. The rest they were to pay between them, though Jack at first insisted upon paying the whole. But in this Grey overruled him, and they agreed to share the expense equally.
Nothing could be kinder or more deferential than their demeanor toward Bessie, who, wholly overcome with grief and fatigue, lay perfectly quiet in her room, and let them do what they liked, she was so weary and worn, and it was so good to be cared for; but on the day of the funeral she roused herself, and insisted upon going to the grave and seeing her father buried; so, with Grey and Jack on either side she walked through the yew-shaded garden to the small inclosure which was the family burying-place, and was so full of the McPhersons that after Archie's grave, there was only room for one more between him and the wall, and both Grey and Jack noticed this as they stood there and wondered if it would be Bessie or Daisy who some day would be brought there and laid in her last bed.
"Not Bessie," Grey thought, and there arose before him a beautiful spot far over the sea, where the headstones gleamed white in the sunlight, and the grass was like velvet to the touch, and flowers were blooming in gay parterres and the birds were singing all day long over Mount Auburn's dead.
And "not Bessie," Jack thought, as he, too, remembered a quiet spot away to the north of England, where the tall monuments bore the name of Trevellian, and where his race were buried.
The services over at the grave, they went back to the house, and in the evening Grey said good-by, for on the morrow he was due at Liverpool to meet his Aunt Lucy, who was coming abroad to spend a year with him in travel.
"I shall see you again before I go to America, and it possible will bring my Aunt Lucy with me," he said to her, when at parting he stood a few moments with her small, thin hand in his, while he spoke a few words to her of Him who can heal all pain and cure the sorest heart sorrow, because he has felt it all.
Grey's piety, which was genuine, did not so often manifest itself in words as in deeds, but he felt constrained to speak to Bessie, whose tears fell like rain as she listened to him, and who felt when he was gone a greater sense of loneliness than before, even though Jack was left to her; Jack, who tried so hard to soothe her, and who was tender and thoughtful as a brother, and gave no sign to her of the volcano raging within when he thought of the Hon. John and Neil, neither of whom sent a word to the stricken girl waiting so anxiously for news from them. But he wrote to them both. To the Hon. John, he said: