When George left the room, his arm was about his black-robed mother,
his shoulders were still shaken with sobs. He leaned upon his mother;
she gently comforted him; and presently he recovered his composure and
became self-conscious enough to wonder if he had not been making an
unmanly display of himself. "I'm all right again, mother," he said
awkwardly. "Don't worry about me: you'd better go lie down, or
something; you look pretty pale."
Isabel did look pretty pale, but not ghastly pale, as Fanny did.
Fanny's grief was overwhelming; she stayed in her room, and George did
not see her until the next day, a few minutes before the funeral, when
her haggard face appalled him. But by this time he was quite himself
again, and during the short service in the cemetery his thoughts even
wandered so far as to permit him a feeling of regret not directly
connected with his father. Beyond the open flower-walled grave was a
mound where new grass grew; and here lay his great-uncle, old John
Minafer, who had died the previous autumn; and beyond this were the
graves of George's grandfather and grandmother Minafer, and of his
grandfather Minafer's second wife, and her three sons, George's half-
uncles, who had been drowned together in a canoe accident when George
was a child--Fanny was the last of the family.
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