Then, slowly, Grandmother Gaumer turned her head and looked at Katy. Her eyes were intolerable to Katy.
"What shall I do?" she asked. "I am old. I cannot think. We have lived together fifty years. I cannot remember where my things are. There are things put away in the bureaus all ready for such a time. What shall I do, Katy?"
With a gasp Katy drove back the tears from her smarting eyelids. Katy was confused, bewildered; she still lacked the education with which she expected to meet the problems of life. But Katy, whose forte was managing, did not fail here.
"You will sit here in this chair, gran'mom. I will get a white pillow to put on the settee and they can lay gran'pop there. Then we will find the things for them." She guided her grandmother to the armchair and helped her to sit down. Even the touch of her body seemed different. "It will take only a minute for me to go upstairs. I will be back right away. You know how quickly I can run."
When Katy returned, the feet of the bearers were at the door. With them Millerstown crowded in, weeping. Grandmother Gaumer had wept with them, Grandfather Gaumer had helped them in their troubles. Grandfather was laid in state in the best room and presently the house settled into quiet. In this house five generations had met grief with dignity and death with hope; thus they should be met once more.
Preparations were begun at once for the laying away of the body in the little graveyard of the church which the soul had loved. At the feet of his mother, beside his little sister, a grave was dug for William Gaumer and was lined with boughs of arbor vitæ and sprays of life everlasting.
In the Gaumer house there was little sweeping and cleaning; the beds were not made up for show, but were prepared for the gathering relatives. Grandfather Gaumer did not lie alone in the best room as John Hartman had lain; his children and his grandchildren went in and sat beside him and talked of him.
When the funeral was over and the house was in order and the relatives had gone, Katy sat on her little stool at her grandmother's knee and cried her fill. Grandmother Gaumer had not given way to grief. She had moved about among her kin, she had given directions, she had wept only a little.
To Katy there was not now a ray of brightness in the world.
"Nothing is certain," she mourned. "My gran'pop brought me up. I was always by him, he was my father. I cannot get along without him."