As the morning grew and the news traveled on the swift pinions with which bad news is winged, the neighbors and relatives came driving into the barnyard. As if in mockery, the cold had abated. The wind had gone down and the winter sunshine began to melt the scant covering of snow that had fallen the day before. The men stood about in the barnyard talking over the accident and the drop in the tobacco market. The women hurried into the house and tried to comfort Lizzie May.
She was wild and hysterical in her grief. Her face swollen and distorted with weeping, she flung herself upon one or another of her sisters, aunts, and cousins, sobbing out to them again and again her anguish and desolation.
"Oh, Judy, Judy, what's a-goin' to become o' these poor little young uns 'ithout no daddy? He was allus that sorry fer little orphans. He never thought how soon his own'd be orphans. Oh, oh, oh!"
"He was too good," she kept saying in her calmer moments. "That's why he was taken away. He was too good."
She had never entertained nor voiced such a sentiment during his life. But now she said it and believed it too.
In a far corner of the kitchen Aunt Nannie Pooler sat and mourned softly for her dead boy.
"He was too good," sobbed Lizzie May, burying her face on Aunt Selina's bosom. "Oh, Aunt Selina, he was too good."
Tears streamed down the old woman's leathery cheeks. She had seen many die, but yet death was not an old story. She could still weep as in the days of her youth.
With each new arrival who came to offer her tribute of sympathy to the widowed girl, she went over it all again with convulsive sobs and fresh bursts of weeping.
"It's better she talks," whispered Aunt Mary Blackford to her neighbor. "Some jes sits an' thinks. An' them's the ones that feels it most."