But the solemn funeral services were over; the speculator in claims dried his eyes, and that very afternoon assigned a claim, to which he had no right, to a simple-minded immigrant for a hundred dollars.  Minorkey was devoutly thankful that his own daughter had escaped, and that he could go on getting mortgages with waivers in them, and Plausaby turned his attention to contrivances for extricating himself from the embarrassments of his situation.

The funeral was over.  That is the hardest time of all.  You can bear up somehow, so long as the arrangements and cares and melancholy tributes of the obsequies last.  But if one has occupied a large share of your thoughts, solicitudes, and affections, and there comes a time when the very last you can ever do for them, living or dead, is done, then for the first time you begin to take the full measure of your loss.  Albert felt now that he was picking up the broken threads of another man’s life.  Between the past, which had been full of anxieties and plans for little Kate, and the future, into which no little Kate could ever come, there was a great chasm.  There is nothing that love parts from so regretfully as its burdens.

Mrs. Ferret came to see Charlton, and smiled her old sudden puckered smile, and talked in her jerky complacent voice about the uses of sanctified affliction, and her trust that the sudden death of his sister in all the thoughtless vanity of youth would prove a solemn and impressive warning to him to repent in health before it should be with him everlastingly too late.  Albert was very far from having that childlike spirit which enters the kingdom of heaven easily.  Some natures, are softened by affliction, but they are not such as his.  Charlton in his aggressiveness demanded to know the reason for everything.  And in his sorrow his nature sent a defiant why back to the Power that had made Katy’s fate so sad, and Mrs. Ferret’s rasping way of talking about Katy’s death as a divine judgment on him filled him with curses bitterer than Job’s.

Miss Isa Marlay was an old-school Calvinist.  She had been trained on the Assembly’s Catechism, interpreted in good sound West Windsor fashion.  In theory she never deviated one iota from the solid ground of the creed of her childhood.  But while she held inflexibly to her creed in all its generalizations, she made all those sweet illogical exceptions which women of her kind are given to making.  In general, she firmly believed that everybody who failed to have a saving faith in the vicarious atonement of Christ would be lost.  In particular, she excepted many individual cases among her own acquaintance.  And the inconsistency between her creed and her applications of it never troubled her.  She spoke with so much confidence of the salvation of little Kate, that she comforted Albert somewhat, notwithstanding his entire antagonism to Isa’s system of theology.  If Albert had died, Miss Marlay would have fixed up a short and easy road to bliss for him also.  So much, more generous is faith than logic!  But it was not so much Isa’s belief in the salvation of Katy that did Albert good, as it was her tender and delicate sympathy, expressed as much when she was silent as when she spoke, and when she spoke expressed more by the tones of her voice than by her words.