entirely of
doing good.

But the solemn funeral services were over; the speculator in claims dried
his eyes, and that very afternoon assigned a claim, to which he had no
right, to a simple-minded immigrant for a hundred dollars. Minorkey was
devoutly thankful that his own daughter had escaped, and that he could go
on getting mortgages with waivers in them, and Plausaby turned his
attention to contrivances for extricating himself from the embarrassments
of his situation.

The funeral was over. That is the hardest time of all. You can bear up
somehow, so long as the arrangements and cares and melancholy tributes of
the obsequies last. But if one has occupied a large share of your
thoughts, solicitudes, and affections, and there comes a time when the
very last you can ever do for them, living or dead, is done, then for the
first time you begin to take the full measure of your loss. Albert felt
now that he was picking up the broken threads of another man's life.
Between the past, which had been full of anxieties and plans for little
Kate, and the future, into which no little Kate could ever come, there
was a great chasm. There is nothing that love parts from so regretfully
as its burdens.

Mrs. Ferret came to see Charlton, and smiled her old sudden puckered
smile, and talked in her jerky complacent voice about the uses of
sanctified affliction, and her trust that the sudden death of his sister
in all the thoughtless vanity of youth would prove a solemn and
impressive warning to him to repent in health before it should be with
him everlastingly too late. Albert was very far from having that
childlike spirit which enters the kingdom of heaven easily. Some
natures, are softened by affliction, but they are not such as his.
Charlton in his aggressiveness demanded to know the reason for
everything. And in his sorrow his nature sent a defiant _why_ back to
the Power that had made Katy's fate so sad, and Mrs. Ferret's rasping
way of talking about Katy's death as a divine judgment on him filled him
with curses bitterer than Job's.

Miss Isa Marlay was an old-school Calvinist. She had been trained on the
Assembly's Catechism, interpreted in good sound West Windsor fashion. In
theory she never deviated one iota from the solid ground of the creed of
her childhood. But while she held inflexibly to her creed in all its
generalizations, she made all those sweet illogical exceptions which
women of her kind are given to making. In gen