ld Flamma, Mrs. Iden's father,
died in London.

After thirty years of absolute quiet at Coombe Oaks, husband and wife
went up to London to the funeral, which took place at one of those
fearful London cemeteries that strike a chill at one's very soul. Of all
the horrible things in the world there is nothing so calmly ghastly as a
London cemetery.

In the evening, after the funeral, Mr. and Mrs. Iden went to the
theatre.

"How frivolous! How unfeeling!" No, nothing of the sort; how truly sad
and human, for to be human is to be sad. That men and women should be so
warped and twisted by the pressure of the years out of semblance to
themselves; that circumstances should so wall in their lives with
insurmountable cliffs of granite facts, compelling them to tread the
sunless gorge; that the coldness of death alone could open the door to
pleasure.

They sat at the theatre with grey hearts. With the music and the song,
the dancing, the colours and gay dresses, it was sadder there than in
the silent rooms at the house where the dead had been. Old Flamma alone
had been dead _there_; they were dead here. Dead in life--at the
theatre.

They had used to go joyously to the theatre thirty years before, when
Iden came courting to town; from the edge of the grave they came back
to look on their own buried lives.

If you will only _think_, you will see it was a most dreadful and
miserable incident, that visit to the theatre after the funeral.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

CHAPTER X.

WHEN Mrs. Iden threw his lardy-cake descent in Iden's face she alluded
to Grandfather Iden's being a baker and miller, and noted for the
manufacture of these articles. A lardy, or larded, cake is a thing, I
suppose, unknown to most of this generation; they were the principal
confectionery familiar to country folk when Grandfather Iden was at the
top of his business activity, seventy years since, in the Waterloo era.

A lardy-cake is an oblong, flat cake, crossed with lines, and rounded at
the corners, made of dough, lard, sugar, and spice. Our ancestors liked
something to gnaw at, and did not go in for lightness in their pastry;
they liked something to stick to their teeth, and after that to their
ribs. The lardy-cake eminently fulfilled these conditions; they put a
trifle of sugar and spice in it, to set it going as it were, and the
rest depended on the strength of the digestion. But if a ploughboy could
get a new, warm lardy