morning after morning in the hopeless search for work,
and slunk home night after night bitter and dejected; many of whom had
listened, jeeringly perhaps, to his grievance against the world, though
it were in some sort their own. Death, for them, had ennobled him. The
little girl whom Hodder had met with the pitcher of beer came tiptoeing
with a wilted bunch of pansies, picked heaven knows where; stolen, maybe,
from one of the gardens of the West End. Carnations, lilies of the
valley, geraniums even--such were the offerings scattered loosely on the
lid until a woman came with a mass of white roses that filled the room
with their fragrance,--a woman with burnished red hair. Hodder started
as he recognized her; her gaze was a strange mixture of effrontery and
--something else; sorrow did not quite express it. The very lavishness of
her gift brought to him irresistibly the reminder of another offering.
. . . . She was speaking.

"I don't blame him for what he done--I'd have done it, too, if I'd been
him. But say, I felt kind of bad when I heard it, knowing about the kid,
and all. I had to bring something--"

Instinctively Hodder surmised that she was in doubt as to the acceptance
of her flowers. He took them from her hand, and laid them at the foot of
the coffin.

"Thank you," he said, simply.

She stared at him a moment with the perplexity she had shown at times on
the night he visited her, and went out. . .

Funerals, if they might be dignified by this name, were not infrequent
occurrences in Dalton Street, and why this one should have been looked
upon as of sufficient importance to collect a group of onlookers at the
gate it is difficult to say. Perhaps it was because of the seeming
interest in it of the higher powers--for suicide and consequent widows
and orphans were not unknown there. This widow and this orphan were to
be miraculously rescued, were to know Dalton Street no more. The rector
of a fashionable church, of all beings, was the agent in the miracle.
Thus the occasion was tinged with awe. As for Mr. Bentley, his was a
familiar figure, and had been remarked in Dalton Street funerals before.

They started, the three mourners, on the long drive to the cemetery,
through unfrequented streets lined with mediocre dwellings, interspersed
with groceries and saloons--short cuts known only to hearse drivers: they
traversed, for some distance, that very Wilderness road where Mr.
Bentley's old-fashioned mansion once