next day when towards evening Miss

be under the circumstances in which she found herself so suddenly, so lamentably placed, or Lucy's explanations were vague, for Miss Entwhistle took Wemyss for

again once before the funeral, but at least, owing to Miss Entwhistle's inability to do without him, he didn't have to spend any more solitary hours. Except breakfast, he had all his meals up in the little house on the

oncerned, grave-faced people. Wemyss, who had done everything and been everything, disappeared in this crowd. Nobody noticed him. None of James Entwhistle's friends happened-luckily, he felt, with last week's newspapers still fresh in the

e it really was a remarkable achievement, the way he had done it, the smooth way the whole thing was going. But to-morrow,-what would happen to-morrow, when all these people had gone away again? Would they take Lucy and the aunt with them? Would the house up there be shut, and he, Wemyss, left alone again with his bitter, miserable recollections? He wouldn't, of course, s

whenever he appeared. Vera's face hadn't done that. Vera had never understood him, not with fifteen years to do it in, as this girl had in half a day. And the way Vera had died,-it was no use mincing matters when it came to one's own thoughts, and it had been all of a piece with her life: the disregard for others and of anything said to her for her own good, the determination to do what suited her, to lean out of dangerous windows

th these thoughts, he suddenly caught sight of Lucy's face. The priest was coming down the aisle in

full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he

fternoon sun from the west window and the open west door pouring on his face and on t

out of the shadow and joined her, boldly walking on her other side at the head of the procession, and standing beside her at the grave; and at

tly a relation of poor Jim's. Nor was anybody surprised when Wemyss, not letting her go again, took her home

and she, isolated together by their sorrows, understood without any words. And when they reached the house, the first to reach it from the church just as if, he couldn't help thin

man who was helping Mis

n sobbing without stopping from the first words of the burial ser

emember coming acr

riends,' sobbed poor Miss Entwhis

rner, was the only person who was asked to

l with tears in her voice, 'at my dear brother's devotion to

nor Lucy felt equ

d certainly have been true that he was devoted to him. He hadn't known him; he had missed him by-yes, by just three hours; and this wonderful friend of hers was the very first good thing that she and her father hadn't shar

s of cold and pallid dishes with which the imaginative cook, a woman of Celtic origin, had expressed her respectful appreciati

tive. We belong-belonged-to an exiguous family, and naturally I'm no longer as young as

interrupted by a sob, and

ter a moment, during whic

'poor Lucy will be without any one, unless Jim thought of this a

aid hovering, and one couldn't anyhow go into explana

ly they noticed nothing in the way the cook had intended. Wemyss was privately a little put out by the coffee being cold. He had eaten all the other clammy things patiently, but a man likes his after-dinner coffee hot, and it was new in his experience to have it served cold. He did notice this, and was surprised t

and some sinister-looking wine in a decanter, which he avoided because when he took hold of it ice clinked, he rang the bell as unobtrusively as he could and asked the parlour

e, as she herself was the first to admit, with gentlemen than wit

emyss, whose mind on

lourmaid, nodding symp

t wasn't expected that it should be enjoyed, but it was the cook's tribute to her late master's burial day,-a master they had only

ng the comforting drin

the cook would have given notice if she hadn't been because she was such a very dishonest and unpunctual lady, besides not knowing her place-no lady, of course, and never was-when she was taken, not sudden like this poor

eye anxiously on the windo

d soles?' he aske

It's how you spell it makes the difference, Cook said. And the next

for what could it possibly sound like to the two mourners on the lawn, he gav

laughing, though what Uncle Wemyss (thus did he figure in the conversations of the kitchen) could see to laugh at in the cook's way of getting her own back, the parlourmaid, whose flesh had crept when she first heard the story, couldn't understand; but presently she feared he wasn't laughing at all but was being, in

d his half-drunk whisky, and followed her out just in time to meet Luc

wiping his eyes, whic

twhistle anxiously. 'We he

ght-it's nothing at all,' he added to Lucy, who

ong. He wanted to get away from woe, to be with normal, cheerful people again, to have done with conditions in which a laugh was the most improper o

ened once to everybody showed how exceptional it was, thought Wemyss, thoroughly disgusted with it. Why couldn't he and the Entwhistles go off somewhere to-morrow, away from this place altogether, go abroad for a bit, to somewhere cheerful, where nobody knew them and nobody would expect them to go about with long faces all day? Ostend, for instance? His mood of sympathy and gentleness had for the moment quite gone. He was indignant that there should be circumstances under which a man felt as guilty over a laugh as over a crime. A natural person like himself looked at things wholesomely. It was healthy and proper to forget horrors, to dismiss them from one's mind. If convention, that offspring of cruelty and hypocrisy, insisted tha

down at the two small black figures and solemn tired faces that w

h Lucy?' asked

sible wishes, and watched him with the

ng at the upturned faces. He felt very consc

had the feeling of being taken care of and safe. Sad as she was at the end of that sad day, she still was able to notice how nice her very ordina

he drawing-room?' a

o naturally wished to hold Lucy's little hand i

emyss in the middle, and Lucy's hand, when it got

egan, 'must get the rose

h in her voice at the mere reminder of the absence of Luc

se to set about i

lped Miss

im

we must both wait p-patientl

ulled out her

from being patient one should be impatient. One shouldn't wait resignedly for time to help one, one should up and take time by the forelock. In cases of this kind, and believe me I know what I'm talking about'-it was here that his hand,

e differently. Their talk used to seem as if it ran about the room like liquid fire, it was so quick and shining; often it was quite beyond her till her father afterwards, when she asked him, explained it, put it more simply for her, eager as he a

. Wemyss-one ought-it would be more-more heroic. But then if one-if one has loved

ff and wipe

aven't ever loved anybody very-

at that, and moved

e seemed, on looking back, to have loved a great deal. Certainly he had loved Vera with the utmost devot

, so clinging, so understanding,

said, very gravely, 'My wif

hed. 'Ah,' she cried, 'b