“He’ll have to swing for it all the same,” said Lee, going out.

“It don’t seem right, if he wasn’t himself when he did it.”

“Lord, we’re all crazy when it comes to things like that,” returned Lee.  Before closing the door he flashed his black eyes and white teeth at Andrew, who felt repelled.

He sat down beside the table and leaned his head upon it.  To his fancy all creation seemed to circle about that one dead man.  Mr. Lloyd had been for years the arbiter of his destiny, almost of his life.  Andrew had regarded him with almost feudal loyalty and admiration, and lately with bitter revolt and hatred, and now he was dead.  He felt no sorrow, but rather a terrible remorse because he felt no sorrow.  All the bitter thoughts which he had ever had against Lloyd seemed to marshal themselves before him like an accusing legion of ghosts.  And with it all there was a sense of desolation, as if some force which had been necessary to his full living had gone out of creation.

“It’s over thirty years since I went to work under him,” Andrew thought, and he gave a dry sob.  At that moment a wonderful pity and sorrow for the dead man seemed to spring up in his soul like a light.  He felt as if he loved him.

Norman Lloyd’s funeral was held in the First Baptist Church of Rowe.  It was crowded.  Mr. Lloyd had been the most prominent manufacturer and the wealthiest man in the city.  His employes filled up a great space in the body of the church.

Andrew went with his mother and wife.  They arrived quite early.  When Andrew saw the employes of Lloyd’s marching in, he drew a great sigh.  He looked at the solemn black thing raised on trestles before the pulpit with an emotion which he could not himself understand.  “That man ’ain’t treated me well enough for me to care anything about him,” he kept urging upon himself.  “He never paid any more attention to me than a gravel-stone under his feet; there ain’t any reason why I should have cared about him, and I don’t; it can’t be that I do.”  Yet arguing with himself in this way, he continued to eye the casket which held his dead employer with an unyielding grief.

Mrs. Zelotes sat like a black, draped statue at the head of the pew, but her eyes behind her black veil were sharply observant.  She missed not one detail.  She saw everything; she counted the wreaths and bouquets on the casket, and stored in her mind, as vividly as she might have done some old mourning-piece, the picture of the near relatives advancing up the aisle.

Mrs. Lloyd came leaning on her nephew’s arm, and there were Cynthia Lennox and a distant cousin, an elderly widow who had been summoned to the house of death.

Ellen sat in the body of the church, with the employes of Lloyd’s, between Abby Atkins and Maria.  She glanced up when the little company of mourners entered, then cast her eyes down again and compressed her lips.  Maria began to weep softly, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes.  Ellen’s mother had begged her not to sit with the employes, but with her and her father and grandmother in their own pew, but the girl had refused.