sently, in his faint voice--he always called her
Janet now. In a moment she was close to him, bending over him. He opened
his hand as he looked up at her, and she placed hers within it.

'Janet,' he said again, 'you will have a long while to live after I am
gone.'

A sudden pang of fear shot through her. She thought he felt himself
dying, and she sank on her knees at his feet, holding his hand, while she
looked up at him, almost breathless.

'But you will not feel the need of me as you have done ... You have a
sure trust in God ... I shall not look for you in vain at the last.'

'No ... no ... I shall be there ... God will not forsake me.'

She could hardly utter the words, though she was not weeping. She was
waiting with trembling eagerness for anything else he might have to say.

'Let us kiss each other before we part.'

She lifted up her face to his, and the full life-breathing lips met the
wasted dying ones in a sacred kiss of promise.

Chapter 28

It soon came--the blessed day of deliverance, the sad day of bereavement;
and in the second week of March they carried him to the grave. He was
buried as he had desired: there was no hearse, no mourning-coach; his
coffin was borne by twelve of his humbler hearers, who relieved each
other by turns. But he was followed by a long procession of mourning
friends, women as well as men.

Slowly, amid deep silence, the dark stream passed along Orchard Street,
where eighteen months before the Evangelical curate had been saluted with
hooting and hisses. Mr. Jerome and Mr. Landor were the eldest
pall-bearers; and behind the coffin, led by Mr. Tryan's cousin, walked
Janet, in quiet submissive sorrow. She could not feel that he was quite
gone from her; the unseen world lay so very near her--it held all that
had ever stirred the depths of anguish and joy within her.

It was a cloudy morning, and had been raining when they left Holly Mount;
but as they walked, the sun broke out, and the clouds were rolling off in
large masses when they entered the churchyard, and Mr. Walsh's voice was
heard saying, 'I am the Resurrection and the Life'. The faces were not
hard at this funeral; the burial-service was not a hollow form. Every
heart there was filled with the memory of a man who, through a
self-sacrificing life and in a painful death, had been sustained by the
faith which fills that form with breath and substance.

When Janet left the grave, she did not return to Holly M