The crowd drew back from the coffin, the School-teacher went and sat in the doorway in the sun; the little boy standing up by his knees, the little girl beside him on the doorstep.
The minister began a discourse on the horrors of an eternal hell.
But the attention of the audience moved past him to the man seated in the door. The harmony, grouping the man and these two children, seemed to enter and fill the room. A certain common sympathy uniting them, as though it were the purity of childhood.
The man sitting in the door did not move.
He looked out toward the south over a sea of sun washing a shore of tree tops. A vagrant breath of the afternoon moved his brown hair. He seemed not to hear the minister, not to regard the service, but to wait like one infinitely patient with the order of events.
When the preacher had finished, the miller, sitting in a chair by the window, rose.
“Just before ole Nicholas died,” she said, “he made the doctor promise to git up here at his funeral an' tell everybody that he left all his things to the Schoolteacher. The doctor couldn't come back, so he asked me to git up an' tell it for him.”
The minister turned toward the woman.
“Left his property to this stranger?”
“Yes,” said the woman, “he tried all night to tell the doctor, an' he was mortally afeard that he would die before he could tell it.”