Martin was a very old man himself, but he had no imagination for his own funeral.

It seemed to him grotesque and impossible that an undertaker should ever be in need of his own ministrations.

His solemn wagon stood before the door of the great colonial house, and he and his son-in-law and his daughter, who were his assistants, were engaged at their solemn tasks within.
The daughter, Flora Barnes, was arraying the dead woman in her last robe of state, while her father and brother-in-law waited in the south room across the wide hall.

When her task was performed she entered the south room with a gentle pride evident in her thin, florid face.
"She makes a beautiful corpse," she said, in a hissing whisper.
Henry Whitman and his wife were in the room, with Martin Barnes and Simeon Capen, his son-in-law.

Barnes and Capen rose at once with pleased interest, Henry and Sylvia more slowly; yet they also had expressions of pleasure, albeit restrained.