It pleased her to ignore that last clause of his reply.
“I’d have tried, anyhow,” she said; “I’d have helped him to escape from them. Where is he now?”
“You are as capable of deciding that question as I,” he answered, turning away with a slight shudder.
“You misunderstand me wilfully,” she said, her eyes flashing with anger. “I want to know what you have done with his body.”
“Buried it,” he returned, laconically.
“Buried it? without consulting me! without letting me know! without giving me time to attend the funeral! How dared you, Amos Wiley!”
“I thought that, under the peculiar circumstances, the best thing to be done was to put the body into the ground as quietly and with as little fuss as possible; and he would not have been a pleasant sight for you to look upon.”
“What do you mean, Amos Wiley?” she demanded, starting up to a sitting posture and regarding him with looks of fury and indignation; “that you had no funeral services, but gave him, my brother, the burial of a dog?”
“I had no thought of that,” he said; “I laid him away decently and quietly, that was all. I did not suppose you would feel like having a funeral, considering how the neighbors and all the townspeople must have regarded his death, and—and the cause of it.”
“You mean that they thought him disgraced, and that I’d feel ashamed of him and of—of what he did, and the way he lost his life? No such thing! I consider him a martyr, and should have gloried in showing everybody that I thought so.”