It happened on a spring evening, and she who now and for many years had filled that first wife's place was then parlour-maid in the parson's house.
When everything had been done that could be done, and the death was announced, she had gone out in the dusk to visit her parents, who were living in the same village, to tell them the sad news.

As she opened the white swing-gate and looked towards the trees which rose westward, shutting out the pale light of the evening sky, she discerned, without much surprise, the figure of a man standing in the hedge, though she roguishly exclaimed as a matter of form, 'Oh, Sam, how you frightened me!' He was a young gardener of her acquaintance.

She told him the particulars of the late event, and they stood silent, these two young people, in that elevated, calmly philosophic mind which is engendered when a tragedy has happened close at hand, and has not happened to the philosophers themselves.

But it had its bearing upon their relations.
'And will you stay on now at the Vicarage, just the same ?' asked he.
She had hardly thought of that.

'Oh, yes--I suppose!' she said.
'Everything will be just as usual, I imagine ?' He walked beside her towards her mother's.