“For guidance to-morrow,” I murmured.  “Mr. Hines, I’m not sure that I know Bartholomew Storrs’s God.  Nor can I tell what manner of sign he might give, or with what meaning.  But if I know my God, whom I believe to be the true God, your Minnie is safe with him.”

“Yeh?  You’re a good guy, Dominie,” said Mr. Hines in his emotionless voice.

I took him home with me to sleep.  But we did not sleep.  We smoked.

Minnie Munn’s funeral morning dawned clear and fresh.  No word came from Bartholomew Storrs.  I tried to find him, but without avail.

“We’ll go through with it,” said Mr. Hines quietly.

How small and insignificant seemed our tiny God’s Acre, as the few mourners crept into it behind Minnie Munn’s body; the gravestones like petty dots upon the teeming earth, dwarfed by the overshadowing tenements, as if death were but an incident in the vast, unhasting, continuous sweep of life, as indeed perhaps it is.  Then the grandeur of the funeral service, which links death to immortality, was bodied forth in the aged minister’s trembling voice, and by it the things which are of life were dwarfed to nothingness.  But my uneasy mind refused to be bound by the words; it was concerned with Bartholomew Storrs, standing grim, haggard, inscrutable, beside the grave, his eyes upturned and waiting.  Too well I knew for what he was waiting; his sign.  So, too, did Mr. Hines, still hard, still pink, still impeccably tailored, and still clinging to his elegant lacquered cane, as he supported little, broken Mr. Munn, very pathetic and decorous in full black, even to the gloves.

The sonorous beauty and simplicity of the rite suddenly checked, faltered.  Bartholomew Storrs leaned over anxiously to the minister.  The poor, gentle, worn-out old brain was groping now in semi-darkness, through which shot a cross-ray of memory.  The tremulous voice took on new confidence, but the marrow of my spine turned icy as I heard the fatally misplaced and confused words that followed: 

“If any man know—­know just and good cause why this woman—­why this woman—­should not—­”

Bartholomew Storrs’s gaunt hand shot upward, high in air, outspread in the gesture of forbiddance.  His deep voice rang, overbearing the stumbling accents of the clergyman.

“A sign!  A sign from on High!  O God, thou hast spoken through thy servant to forefend a sore offense.  Listen, ye people.  This woman—­”

He stopped as there rose, on the opposite side of the open grave another figure, with hands and voice lifted to heaven in what must surely have been the most ingenuous supplication that ever ascended to the throne of Pity and Understanding.  All the passion which, through the bitter hours, had been repressed in the self-commanding soul of the hard and pink Mr. Hines, swelled and cried aloud in his plea: 

“O God! have a heart!”

Bartholomew Storrs’s hand fell.  His eyes faltered.  His lips trembled.  He stood once more, agonized with doubt.  And in that moment the old minister came to his rightful senses.