Last of all came Ralph.  As leader of the party he had thought it proper to give precedence to the rest.  The lady took his hand as he came by, the same hand that had received her husband’s tender care; but there was something in his pallid, grief-marked face, in the brown eyes filled with tears, in the sensitive trembling of the delicate lips, as she looked down on him, that brought swift tenderness for him to her heart.  She bent over and lifted up his face to hers, and kissed his lips, and then, unable longer to restrain her emotion, she turned and hastened up the stairway, and was lost to sight.

For many minutes Ralph stood still, in gratified amazement.  It was the first time in all his life, so far as memory served him, that any one had kissed him.  And that this grief-stricken lady should be the first—­it was very strange, but very beautiful, indeed.  He felt that by that kiss he had been lifted to a higher level, to a clearer, purer atmosphere, to a station where better things than he had ever done before would be expected of him now; he felt, indeed, as though it were the first long reach ahead to attain to such a manhood as was Robert Burnham’s.  The repetition of this name in his mind brought him to himself, and he turned into the parlor just as the last one of the other boys was passing out.  He hurried across the room to look upon the face of his friend and employer.  It was not the unpleasant sight that he had feared it might be.  The dead man’s features were relaxed and calm.  A smile seemed to be playing about the lips.  The face had all its wonted color and fulness, and one might well have thought, looking on the closed eye-lids, that he lay asleep.

Standing thus in the presence of death, the boy had no fear.  His only feeling was one of tenderness and of deep sorrow.  The man had been so kind to him in life, so very kind.  It seemed almost as though the lips might part and speak to him.  But he was dead; this was his face, this his body; but he, himself, was not here.  Dead!  The word struck harshly on his mind and roused him from his reverie.  He looked up; the boys had all gone, only the kind-faced woman stood there with a puzzled expression in her eyes.  She had chanced to mark the strong resemblance between the face of the dead man and that of the boy who looked upon it; a resemblance so striking that it startled her.  In the countenance of Robert Burnham as he had looked in life, one might not have noticed it, but—­

  “Sometimes, in a dead man’s face,
    To those that watch it more and more,
    A likeness, hardly seen before,
  Comes out, to some one of his race.”

It was so here.  The faces of the dead man and of the living boy were the faces of father and son.

Ralph turned away, at last, from the lifeless presence before him, from the searching eyes of the woman, from the hall with its dim suggestions of something in the long ago, and went out into the street, into the sunlight, into the busy world around him; but from that time forth a shadow rested on his young life that had never darkened it before,—­a shadow whose cause he could not fathom and whose gloom he could not dispel.