tle girl with her algebra again, and at once he was conscious of
an odd and decidedly unpleasant sensation, somewhere far away inside of
him. He felt that he ought to say something, to sum up his attitude
toward the unexpected event, but for once in his life he experienced a
difficulty in formulating his thought in precise language. However, the
pause was of the briefest.

"I think," said Sharlee, "the funeral will be Monday afternoon.... You
will go, won't you?"

Queed turned upon her a clouded brow. The thought of taking personal
part in such mummery as a funeral--"barbaric rites," he called them in
the forthcoming Work--was entirely distasteful to him. "No," he said,
hastily. "No, I could hardly do that--"

"Fifi--would like it. It is the last time you will have to do anything
for her."

"Like it? It is hardly as if she would know--!"

"Mightn't you show your regard for a friend just the same, even if your
friend was never to know about it?... Besides--I think of these things
another way, and so did Fifi."

He peered down at her over the banisters, oddly disquieted. The flaring
gas lamp beat mercilessly upon her face, and it occurred to him that she
looked tired around her eyes.

"I think Fifi will know ... and be glad," said Sharlee. "She liked and
admired you. Only day before yesterday she spoke of you. Now she ... has
gone, and this is the one way left for any of us to show that we are
sorry."

Long afterwards, Queed thought that if Charles Weyland's lashes had not
glittered with sudden tears at that moment he would have refused her.
But her lashes did so glitter, and he capitulated at once; and turning
instantly went heavy-hearted up the stairs.

XV

_In a Country Churchyard, and afterwards; of Friends: how they take
your Time while they live, and then die, upsetting your Evening's
Work; and what Buck Klinker saw in the Scriptorium at 2 a.m._

Queed was caught, like many another rationalist before him, by the
stirring beauty of the burial service of the English church.

Fifi's funeral was in the country, at a little church set down in a
beautiful grove which reminds all visitors of the saying about God's
first temples. Near here Mrs. Paynter was born and spent her girlhood;
here Fifi, before her last illness, had come every Sabbath morning to
the Sunday-school; here lay the little strip of God's acre that the now
childless widow called her own. You come by the new electric li