above a whisper of "the stranger who
had passed from our midst into the beyond." His concluding prayer was
quite inaudible. Mrs. Slocum had brought a bouquet of cheerful pink
geraniums from her window plants, which on the top of the closed black
casket made an odd spot of color and life in the dim room. Among the
blossoms were some rose-geranium leaves, whose fragrance seemed to
mantle everything like smoke. While the clergyman conducted the
inaudible services loud voices were heard in the bar-room, and the yelp
of a dog. On one side of the house was the hush of death, on the other
the din of life. James wondered what the clergyman found to say: all
that he had distinguished was the expression, "The stranger within our
midst."

It all seemed horribly farcical to him. The dead man in his casket had
no personality for him; the sniffs of Mrs. Slocum, her boarder with the
hat, assumed, in his eyes, the character of a "Punch and Judy" show. But
along with that feeling came the realization of a most terrible pathos.
He felt a sort of pity for the dead man, whose very personality had
become nothing to him, and the pity was the greater because of that. It
became a pity for the very scheme of things, for man in the abstract,
born perhaps, through no fault of his own, to sin and misery, both
miserable and causing misery throughout his life, and then to end in the
grave, and vanish from the sight and minds of other men. He felt that it
would not be so sad if it were sadder, if Mrs. Slocum's sniffs had come
from her heart, and not from her sentimentality. He felt that a funeral
where love is not is the most mournful function on earth. Then, too, he
felt a great anxiety for Doctor Gordon, who sat shrugged up in his gray
overcoat, with his gray grizzle of beard meeting the collar, and his
forehead heavily corrugated over pent and gloomy eyes.

He was heartily glad when the service was over, when the casket had been
lowered into the grave, when the village hearse had turned off into a
street, the horse going at a sharp trot, and he and Doctor Gordon were
left alone. He drove. Gordon sat hunched into a corner of the buggy, as
he had sat in the corner of the hotel parlor. James hesitated about
saying anything, but finally he spoke, he felt foolishly enough,
although he meant the words to be comforting. "You did all you could to
save his life," he said.

Gordon made no reply.

When they reached the house, Clemency's head disappeared