ncing crowd, and the burden the men carried.

They halted a moment. The table was lowered; a man--apparently a
doctor--had ridden up. He looked at the burden they bore, then he spread
the rough coat again over the body and signed to them to go on. Dick
stepped forward and asked a question. Returning, he said briefly,

"He's dead."

Alicia swayed heavily against Eleanor Scaife. Eleanor threw her arm
round her waist, and answered the moan she heard with--"Hush, darling!"
while Alicia, with parted lips and straining eyes, watched him carried
by.

As they had escorted him home on the day when he first became their
ruler, so they took him to his home now, the throng of mourners ever
growing as the people poured out of the town to meet them, until they
reached his house and halted before his door, waiting for some one who
should dare to carry the news to the fair-haired girl who had met him in
triumph when he came before.

In Kirton the name of "Jimmy Medland" is still remembered, and his grave
does not lack continual flowers. In far-off England few remember him,
and his name is seldom spoken, save when a very old white-haired man
comes to stay with a lady in one of the Midland shires. Then, when they
are alone, when her husband has gone hunting and the children are away,
and there is no other ear to listen, Alicia will sometimes talk to Sir
John of Mr. Medland, what he was and was not, what he did and dreamed,
how he lived and died, and how the men of Kirton love his memory.

"It all seems like a dream now," she says, "but it's a dream I can never
forget."

And Sir John presses her hand, for perhaps he guesses what she has not
told him.

His daughter wrote on his tomb nothing except his name; but a wandering
Englishman, who heard his story, and recollected the grave of another
who died with his work undone, has rudely scratched at the base, near
the ground, where the grass half hides it, an epitaph for him--_Plura
moliebatur_. And he told Big Todd, whom he chanced to find smoking his
evening pipe hard by, that it meant "He had more work in hand."

"Ay, trust old Jimmy!" said Big Todd, with a curious wave of his great
hand towards the grave. Had such a thing been at all in his way, one
might have thought it was a benediction.

THE END.

_Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay_.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Half a Hero, by Anthony Hope

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