porcelains and tapestries, brought home to him with indescribable poignancy his own predicament.  He was going to ask this woman to be comforted by faith and trust in the God of the man who had driven her husband to death!  He beheld Eldon Parr in his pew complacently worshipping that God, who had rewarded him with riches and success—­beheld himself as another man in his white surplice acquiescing in that God, preaching vainly . . . .

At last he got to his feet, went out of the room, reached the doorway of that other room and looked in.  Mr. Bentley sat there; and the woman, whose tears had ceased to flow, was looking up into his face.

II

“The office ensuing,” says the Book of Common Prayer, meaning the Burial of the Dead, “is not to be used for any Unbaptized adult, any who die excommunicate, or who have laid violent hands on themselves.”

Hodder had bought, with a part of Nan Ferguson’s money, a tiny plot in a remote corner of Winterbourne Cemetery.  And thither, the next morning, the body of Richard Garvin was taken.

A few mourners had stolen into the house and up the threadbare stairs into the miserable little back room, somehow dignified as it had never been before, and laid their gifts upon the coffin.  An odd and pitiful assortment they were—­mourners and gifts:  men and women whose only bond with the man in life had been the bond of misery; who had seen him as he had fared forth morning after morning in the hopeless search for work, and slunk home night after night bitter and dejected; many of whom had listened, jeeringly perhaps, to his grievance against the world, though it were in some sort their own.  Death, for them, had ennobled him.  The little girl whom Hodder had met with the pitcher of beer came tiptoeing with a wilted bunch of pansies, picked heaven knows where; stolen, maybe, from one of the gardens of the West End.  Carnations, lilies of the valley, geraniums even—­such were the offerings scattered loosely on the lid until a woman came with a mass of white roses that filled the room with their fragrance,—­a woman with burnished red hair.  Hodder started as he recognized her; her gaze was a strange mixture of effrontery and —­something else; sorrow did not quite express it.  The very lavishness of her gift brought to him irresistibly the reminder of another offering. . . . .  She was speaking.

“I don’t blame him for what he done—­I’d have done it, too, if I’d been him.  But say, I felt kind of bad when I heard it, knowing about the kid, and all.  I had to bring something—­”

Instinctively Hodder surmised that she was in doubt as to the acceptance of her flowers.  He took them from her hand, and laid them at the foot of the coffin.

“Thank you,” he said, simply.

She stared at him a moment with the perplexity she had shown at times on the night he visited her, and went out. . .