The girls in the choir sang on, untroubled by a doubt:—­

     But lo, there breaks a yet more glorious day;
     The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
     The King of glory passes on His way.

They marched outside following the flower-banked casket into the little cemetery, and Queed stood with bared head like the others, watching the committal of dust unto dust.  In the forefront of the mournful gathering, nearest the grave’s edge, there stood three women heavily swathed in black.  Through all the rite now, suppressed sobbing ran like a motif.  Soon fell upon all ears the saddest of all sounds, the pitiless thud of the first earth upon the stiff lid.  On the other side of the irregular circle, Queed saw the coarse red motorman; tears were rolling down his fat cheeks; but never noticing them he was singing loudly, far off the key, from the book the black-gloved hand had given Queed.  The hymn they were singing now also spoke surely and naturally of the saints.  The same proud note, the young man observed, ran through the service from beginning to end.  Hymn and prayer and reading all confidently assumed that Fifi was dead only to this mortal eye, but in another world, open to all those gathered about the grave for their seeking, she lived in some marvelously changed form—­her body being made like unto his own glorious body....

In the homeward-bound car, Queed fully recaptured his poise, and redirected his thoughts into rational channels.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul had not a rational leg to stand on.  The anima, or spirit, being merely the product of certain elements combined in life, was wiped out when those elements dissolved their union in death.  It was the flame of a candle blown out.  Yet with what unbelievable persistence this doctrine had survived through history.  Science had annihilated it again and again, but these people resolutely stopped their ears to science.  They could not answer science with argument, so they had answered her with the axe and the stake; and they were still capable of doing that whenever they thought it desirable.  Strange spectacle!  What was the “conflict between Religion and Science” but man’s desperate struggle against his own reason?  Benjamin Kidd had that right at any rate.

Yet did these people really believe their doctrine of the saved body and the saved soul?  They said they did, but did they?  If they believed it surely, as they believed that this night would be followed by a new day, if they believed it passionately as they believed that money is the great earthly good, then certainly the biggest of their worldly affairs would be less than a grain of sand by the sea against the everlasting glories that awaited them.  Yet ... look at them all about him in the car, these people who told themselves that they had started Fifi on the way to be a saint, in which state they expected to remeet her.  Did they so regard their worldly