reen like graves in
grass. A white house here and there faced him with the stare of
monumental marble. In the middle a church with a stunted spire
squatted like a mortuary chapel. They had run up a gaudy red-brick
villa or two outside, but on the whole Little Sutton was all right,
too. He had always thought it very like a cemetery--a place where
people lay buried till the Day of Judgment.

The man he had been was really dead and buried down there. It was as
if a glorified Stephen Lepper stood up and contemplated his last
resting-place. The clothes he wore were so many signs and symbols of
his joyful resurrection. If any doubted, he could point to them in
proof. Not that he anticipated this necessity. To be sure, his
people had once regarded the possibility of a resurrection as, to
say the least of it, antecedently improbable. They had even refused
to accept his authentic letters, written on the actual paper of a
temperance hotel, as sufficient proof of it. He had not altogether
blamed them for their Sadducean attitude, being a little skeptical
himself.

Nevertheless, the resurrection was an accomplished fact. There had
been a woman in it. She was to have been his wife if she had lived.
But she had not lived, and her death was the one episode as to
which he had been reticent. She was the sort of woman that drives
men to drink by marrying them; for she had a face like an angel and
a tongue like a two-edged sword, sheathed in time of courtship. The
miracle had happened so long ago that it had passed into the region
of things unregarded because admitting of no doubt. He had never
been what you might call a confirmed drunkard--he hadn't been
steady enough for that--and fifteen years of incontrovertible
sobriety had effaced the fitful record of his orgies. So it never
occurred to him now that his character could be regarded otherwise
than with the confidence accorded to such solid and old-established
structures as the Church or Bank. He dreaded no shrinking in the
eyes of the three women he had come to see. But supposing--merely
supposing--anything so unlikely as a mental reservation or
suspension of judgment on their part, there was that solid pile of
dollars at his back for proof. And because the better part of five
million dollars cannot be produced visibly and bodily at a moment's
notice, and because the female mind has difficulty in grasping so
abstract an idea as capital, he had brought with him one or two
little pr