Suddenly he knew the reason of his dread,--he had to face the woman!
He was a minister of Christ, it was his duty to speak to her, as he had
spoken to others in the hour of sorrow and death, of the justice and
goodness of the God to whom she had prayed in the church. What should he
say, now? In an agony of spirit, he sat down on the little couch beside
the window and buried his face in his hands. The sight of poor Garvin's
white and wasted features, the terrible contrast between this miserable
tenement and the palace with its unseen pictures and 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, g