nd Alec Trenholme was
one of the very few who stood, hat in hand, to see the simple rite.

They were not in the old graveyard by the river, but in a new cemetery
that had been opened on a slope above the village. It was a bare, stony
place; shrubs that had been planted had not grown. In the corner where
they untie it, except little by little, in a lifetime, or in
generations of lives! Alec Trenholme, confronted almost for the first
time with the thought that it is not easy to find the ideal modern life,
even when one is anxious to conform to it, began tugging at all the
strands of difficulty at once, not seeing them very clearly, but still
with no notion but that if he set his strength to it, he could unravel
them all in the half-hour's walk that lay between him and the college.

He had not got from under the arching elms at the thin end of the
village when two young ladies in an open phaeton bowed to him. He was
not absent; his mind worked wholesomely at the same instant with his
senses. He saw and knew that these were the Miss Browns, to whom Robert
had introduced him at the end of the Sunday evening service. He thought
them very pretty; he had seen then that they were very gentle and
respectful to Robert; he saw now from the smile that accompanied the
bow, that he was a person they delighted to honour. They were driving
quickly: they were past in a flash of time; and as he replaced his hat
upon his head, he thought that he really was a very good-looking fellow,
very well proportioned, and straight in the legs. He wondered if his
clothes were just the thing; they had not been worn much, but it was a
year since he had got them in England to bring out, and their style
might be a little out of date! Then he thought with satisfaction that
Robert always dressed very well. Robert was very good-looking too. They
were really a very fine pair of brothers! Their father had been a very
fine--He had got quite a bit further on the road since he met the
carriage, so lightly had he stepped to the tune of these thoughts, so
brightly had the sun shone upon them. Now he thought of that pile of
aprons he had in his portmanteau, and he saw them, not as they were now,
freshly calendered in the tight folds of a year's disuse, but as he had
often seen them, with splashes of blood and grease on them. He fancied
the same stains upon his hands; he remembered the empty shop he had
just passed near the general store, which for nearly a year back