"O mamma! why that's mamma," shrieked Reuby, "she was sitting just so when we came away. She isn't dead."
Elder Williams reached the house first, Hannah met him on the threshold, tearless.
"She dead, sir. She's cold as ice. She must ha' been dead a long time."
Old Ike had been rambling around the house, and observing from the outside that Draxy's position was strange, had compelled Hannah to go into the room.
"She was a smilin' just's you see her now," said Hannah, "'n' I couldn't ha' touched her to move her more'n I could ha' touched an angel."
There are griefs, as well as joys, to which words offer insult. Draxy was dead!
Three days later they laid her by the side of her husband, and the gray-haired, childless old people, and the golden-haired, fatherless and motherless boy, returned together broken-hearted to the sunny parsonage.
On the village a terrible silence, that could be felt, settled down; a silence in which sorrowing men and women crept about, weeping as those who cannot be comforted.
Then week followed after week, and soon all things seemed as they had seemed before. But Draxy never died to her people. Her hymns are still sung in the little lonely church; her gospel still lives in the very air of those quiet hills, and the people smile through their tears as they teach her name to little children.