What few belongings the old man had were taken from the Harmon house by the coroner before Harkness left, but no writing was found upon them.  A description of the body was advertised in the Monday’s papers, but no claim came quickly.  Natural law is imperious, seeking to gather earth’s children back to their mother’s breast, and when three warm days were past, all of him that bore earthly image and superscription was given back to earth in a corner of the village cemetery.  An Adventist minister, who sometimes preached in Chellaston, came to hold such service as he thought suitable over the grave, and Alec Trenholme was one of the very few who stood, hat in hand, to see the simple rite.

They were not in the old graveyard by the river, but in a new cemetery that had been opened on a slope above the village.  It was a bare, stony place; shrubs that had been planted had not grown.  In the corner where they untie it, except little by little, in a lifetime, or in generations of lives!  Alec Trenholme, confronted almost for the first time with the thought that it is not easy to find the ideal modern life, even when one is anxious to conform to it, began tugging at all the strands of difficulty at once, not seeing them very clearly, but still with no notion but that if he set his strength to it, he could unravel them all in the half-hour’s walk that lay between him and the college.

He had not got from under the arching elms at the thin end of the village when two young ladies in an open phaeton bowed to him.  He was not absent; his mind worked wholesomely at the same instant with his senses.  He saw and knew that these were the Miss Browns, to whom Robert had introduced him at the end of the Sunday evening service.  He thought them very pretty; he had seen then that they were very gentle and respectful to Robert; he saw now from the smile that accompanied the bow, that he was a person they delighted to honour.  They were driving quickly:  they were past in a flash of time; and as he replaced his hat upon his head, he thought that he really was a very good-looking fellow, very well proportioned, and straight in the legs.  He wondered if his clothes were just the thing; they had not been worn much, but it was a year since he had got them in England to bring out, and their style might be a little out of date!  Then he thought with satisfaction that Robert always dressed very well.  Robert was very good-looking too.  They were really a very fine pair of brothers!  Their father had been a very fine—­He had got quite a bit further on the road since he met the carriage, so lightly had he stepped to the tune of these thoughts, so brightly had the sun shone upon them.  Now he thought of that pile of aprons he had in his portmanteau, and he saw them, not as they were now, freshly calendered in the tight folds of a year’s disuse, but as he had often seen them, with splashes of blood and grease on them.  He fancied the same stains upon his hands; he remembered the empty shop he had just