But there was a sadder day to come--a day when the parting was to be in earnest. Comethup had already said his farewells to Brian, who, indeed, took the matter light-heartedly enough, and waved aside Comethup's carefully prepared apology to him for having apparently stepped into his shoes. Comethup was glad indeed to think that his cousin bore no resentment toward him.
Miss Charlotte Carlaw, delicately enough, had prevented the boy's presence at his father's funeral; only on the day following it the captain had gone with him to the churchyard, and had shown him a new mound, on which fresh wreaths of flowers were lying--a mound close beside the one he already knew so well. It had been a conspiracy between his aunt and the captain to keep his thoughts away from that sad subject, and the boy was a little remorseful at the thought of how well they had succeeded; but his father's life had been in a sense a thing apart from his--a thing so peaceful and full of quiet dreams that it seemed but a natural and fitting ending, even to the mind of the child, that he should sleep here calmly, in this beautiful place, beside the woman he had loved.
The captain had arranged to collect such personal effects of the late David Willis as might be of interest to his son--personal papers, and some portraits of his dead mother, and a few trinkets; the rest were to be sold. Comethup's life in that quiet old place seemed to have closed strangely enough; he seemed, in a sense, to have left those who belonged to him sleeping quietly near their home, and to be going out of the life he had known quite naturally, now that the life itself existed no more.
The day fixed for the departure came at last, dawning just as placidly as a hundred other days had dawned. Comethup even thought it strange that people whose faces he knew passed along in the street below the window of the inn where he sat and went about their business quite heedless of the small boy who seemed to be leaving everything behind. He reflected miserably that everything would go on just the same when he had gone--that the snow would come, and the leaves fall, and the roses bloom again, for some one else; that the captain would take his walks abroad, and sit in church on sunny Sunday mornings; that 'Linda would wander forlorn among the trees in that dreary garden. He fell upon his knees before he left his room and prayed desperately and with tears that God would teach them not to forget him.