The girl looked up when Courtland entered and thanked him for the flowers with her eyes.  The women huddled in the back of the room watched him curiously and let no flicker of an eyelash pass without notice.  They were like hungry birds ready to pounce on any scrap of sentiment or suspicion that might be dropped in their sight.  The doctor came stolidly in and went and stood beside the coffin, looking down for a minute as if he were burning remedial incense in his soul, and then turned away with the frank tears running down his tired, honest face.  He sat down beside Courtland.  The stillness and the strangeness in the bare room were awful.  It was only bearable to look toward the peace in the small, white, dead face; for the calm on the face of the sister cut one to the heart.

The minister and the undertaker stepped into the room, and then it seemed to Courtland as if One other entered also.  He did not look up to see.  He merely had that sense of Another.  It stayed with him and relieved the tension in the room.

Then the voice of the minister, clear, gentle, ringing, triumphant, stole through the room, and out into the hall, even down through the landings, where were huddled some of the neighbors come to listen: 

“And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me:  Write—­Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth ...  But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.  For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him....  For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God:  and the dead in Christ shall rise first.  Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord.  Wherefore comfort one another with these words.”

Courtland listened attentively.  The words were utterly new to him.  If he had heard them before on the few occasions when he had perforce attended funerals, they had never entered into his consciousness.  They seemed almost uncannily to answer the desolating questions of his heart.  He listened with painful attention.  Most remarkable statements!

“But now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept!”

He glanced instinctively around where it seemed that the Presence had entered.  He could not get away from the feeling that He stood just to the left of the minister there, with bowed head, like a great one whose errand and presence there were about to be explained.  It was as if He had come to take the little child away with Him.  Courtland remembered the girl’s prayer the night the child died:  “Go with little Aleck and see that he is not afraid till he gets safe home.”  He glanced up at her calm, tearless face.  She was drinking in the words.  They seemed to give strength under her pitiless sorrow.