kfast at 9:25.

Most of the other boarders had got there before him. It was a mixed
boarding-house, and contained at the moment two gentlemen besides Hilary
and Peter, and five ladies besides Peggy and Rhoda. They were on
the whole a happy and even gay society, and particularly on Sundays.

Peggy, looking up from the tea-cups, gave Peter a broad smile, and Rhoda
gave him a little subdued one, and Peter looked pleased to see everyone;
he always did, even on Mondays.

"I'm sure your brother hasn't a care in the world," an envious lady
boarder had once said to Peggy; "he's always so happy-looking."

This was the lady who was saying, as Peter entered, "And my mother's last
words were, 'Find Elizabeth Dean's grave.' Elizabeth Dean was an author,
you know--oh, very well known, I believe. She treated my mother and me
none too well; didn't stand by us when she should have--but we won't say
anything about that now. Anyhow, it was a costly funeral--forty pounds
and eight horses--and my mother hadn't an idea where she was laid. So she
said, 'Find Elizabeth Dean's grave,' just like that. And the strange
thing was that in the first churchyard I walked into, in a little village
down in Sussex, there was a tombstone, 'Elizabeth Dean, 65. The Lord gave
and the Lord hath taken away.' Wasn't that queer, now? So I went straight
and...."

"The woman's a fool," muttered the gentleman next Peter, a cynical-faced
commercial traveller. Peter had heard the remark from him frequently
before, and did not feel called upon to reply to it.

But the tale of Elizabeth Dean was interrupted by a lady of a speculative
habit of mind.

"Now I want to ask you all, _should_ one put up a tombstone to the
departed? I've been having quite a kick-up with my sisters about it
lately. Hadn't one better spend the money on the living? What do _you_
think, Miss Matthews?"

Miss Matthews said she liked to see a handsome headstone.

"After all, one honours them that way. It's all one can do for them,
isn't it."

"Oh, Miss Matthews, _all_?" Several ladies were shocked. "What about
one's prayers for the dead?"

"I don't pray for the dead," said Miss Matthews, who was a protestant,
and did not attend the large church in the next street. "I do not belong
to the Romish religion. I'm not saying anything against those who do, but
I consider that those who do _not_ should confine their prayers to those
who may require them in this troubled world, and not waste them