No one has ever been able to figure out why the first story is called "The Sisters," for it is about the troubled priest, who dies in the course of the very short story, and the boy narrator he has befriended. The boy lives with his aunt and uncle, so it may not be the first time his life has been affected by death, but it quite likely is the first time he is conscious of his own reaction. He walks up to the house where the priest lived with his two sisters and thinks of entering to pay his respects. Then:
I wished to go in and look at him but I had not the courage to knock. I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went. I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death.
Later, accompanied by his aunt, he does visit the mourning house. When the boy first learned that the priest had died, a friend of his uncle's had hinted broadly that there was something the matter with the priest and his relationship with the boy, and the reader therefore strains, during the visit that closes the story, to discover what that might all be about. One of the sisters tells a story suggesting that the priest suffered from mental illness, but it's hard to grasp exactly what the truth is, and the story ends.
This was not the method of O. Henry. While I have no evidence that it's true, it pleases me to think that the title is a literary tip of the hat to a writer whose method may be detected in Dubliners.
