ily. "Now; you! You got my
hundred in your jeans, ain't you!"

"Bribery!" boomed the sexton. He drew out the roll of bills and let it
fall from his contaminated fingers.

"Sure! Bribery," railed the other. "What'd you think? Ain't it enough
for what I'm asking?" The two men glared at each other.

I broke the silence. "Exactly what are you asking, Mr. Hines?"

"File that"--he touched the document--"and forget it. Let Min rest out
there as my wife, like she ought to have been."

"Why didn't you make her your wife?" thundered the accuser.

Some invisible thing gripped the corded throat of Mr. Hines. "Couldn't,"
he gulped. "There was--another. She wouldn't divorce me."

"Your sin has found you out," declared the self-constituted judge of the
dead with a dismal sort of relish.

"Yeh? That's all right. _I'll_ pay for it. But she's paid already."

"As she lived so she has died, in sin," the inexorable voice answered.
"Let her seek burial elsewhere."

Mr. Hines leaned forward. His expression and tone were passionless as
those of a statistician proffering a tabulation: his words were fit to
wring the heart of a stone.

"She's dead, ain't she?" he argued gently. "She can't hurt any one, can
she? 'Specially if they don't know."

Bartholomew Storrs made a gesture of repulsion.

"Well, who'll she hurt?" pursued the other, in his form of pure and
abstract reasoning. "Not her mother, I guess. Her mother's waiting for
her; that's what Min said when she was--was going. And her father'll be
on the other side of her. And that's all. Min never harmed anybody but
herself when she was alive. How's she going to do 'em any damage now,
just lying there, resting? Be reasonable, man!"

Be pitiful, oh, man! For there was a time not so long past when you,
with all your stern probity and your unwinking conscience, needed pity;
yes, and pleaded for it when the mind was out of control. Think back,
Bartholomew Storrs, to the day when you stood by another grave, close to
that which waits to-day for the weary sleeper--Bartholomew Storrs
rested, opened the door and stood by it, grimly waiting. Mr. Hines
turned to me.

"What is this thing, Dominie; a man or a snake? Will I kill it?"

"Bartholomew," I began. "When we--"

"Not a word from you, Dominie. My mind is made up."

"The girl is Isabel Munn's daughter."

I saw a tremor shake the gaunt frame.

"When we buried Isabel Munn, you came back in the night to weep at her
grave."

He