fted the grief-stricken boy from the kneeling
position in which he had fallen asleep, and put him comfortably upon a
bed in another room, without his awakening.

Details of this sort are harrowing at best, but nothing imaginable
could have been sadder than was the funeral two days later. The rain,
which had never intermitted, fell with dismal hopelessness. Mrs.
Barlow had not been able to leave her bed since the shock, and, never
strong, her life was now almost despaired of.

Checkers stood uncovered in the down-pouring rain, beside the open
grave, his clear-cut face as hard and white as marble. In spite of the
draggling wet and clinging mud, the country people were out in force;
but their gapes, their nudges and whispers, were as little to him as
the falling rain. He was dead to everything but the sense of his
utter, hopeless desolation.

What made it all even sadder, if possible, was that a dreadful breach
had come between him and Sadie and Arthur.

On the morning following that first awful night, he had suddenly
confronted them with the box of powders crushed in his hand, and in his
eyes a tragic, questioning look which spoke, while he stood sternly
silent.

"Oh, Checkers," cried Sadie, falling to her knees and holding out her
hands entreatingly, "forgive us--we did n't know--we didn't know!
Forgive us; please forgive us!"

But his face only grew the harder. "Forgive you," he said, as he
raised his clenched hand to heaven, invokingly; "may God eternally--"
but he faltered, and his voice grew suddenly soft, "forgive you," he
added, dropping his arm and lowering his voice contritely. "But I," he
began again, in measured passionless words--"I can never forgive you.
I never want to see you--either of you--again." And from that hour he
never spoke to them, nor looked at them, any more than as though they
were not.

The funeral was over. He had come home. The rain had ceased. He sat
alone on his doorstep. The minister and some well-meaning but mistaken
friends, who had tried to comfort him, were gone. Over the western
hills the lowering sun broke through the heavy, moving clouds, painting
some a lurid tinge, and lining the heavier ones with silver. Checkers
noted it absently. "Another lie nailed," he muttered, as the trite old
proverb occurred to him. "My cloud is blacker and heavier than any of
those--and silver lining? Humph! Well, silver 's demonetized!" Over
his face there flitted the ghost o