All at once there was a change.  The light seemed thrown into the uttermost places of her darkened soul.  She illumined, and a wave of infinite pity swept her from head to foot.  She leaned forward, her hands seeking his, and upon Anthony Dexter’s dead face there fell the forgiving baptism of her tears.

In the hall, as she went out, she encountered Miss Mehitable.  That face, too, was changed.  She had not come, as comes that ghoulish procession of merest acquaintances, to gloat, living, over the helpless dead.

At the sight of Evelina, she retreated.  “I’ll go back,” murmured Miss Mehitable, enigmatically.  “You had the best right.”

Evelina went down-stairs and home again, but Miss Mehitable did not enter that silent room.

The third day came, and there was no resurrection.  Since the miracle of Easter, the world has waited its three days for the dead to rise again.  Ralph sat in the upper hall, just beyond the turn of the stair, and beside him, unveiled, was Miss Evelina.

“It’s you and I,” he had pleaded, “don’t you see that?  Have you never thought that you should have been my mother?”

From below, in Thorpe’s deep voice, came the words of the burial service:  “I am the resurrection and the life.  He that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

For a few moments, Thorpe spoke of death as the inevitable end of life, and our ignorance of what lies beyond.  He spoke of that mystic veil which never parts save for a passage, and from behind which no word ever comes.  He said that life was a rainbow spanning brilliantly the two silences, that man’s ceasing was no more strange than his beginning, and that the God who ordained the beginning had also ordained the end.  He said, too, that the love which gave life might safely be trusted with that same life, at its mysterious conclusion.  At length, he struck the personal note.

“It is hard for me,” Thorpe went on, “to perform this last service for my friend.  All of you are my friends, but the one who lies here was especially dear.  He was a man of few friendships, and I was privileged to come close, to know him as he was.

“His life was clean, and upon his record there rests no shadow of disgrace.”  At this Ralph, in the upper hall, buried his face in his hands.  Miss Evelina sat quietly, to all intents and purposes unmoved.

“He was a brave man,” Thorpe was saying; “a valiant soldier on the great battlefield of the world.  He met his temptations face to face, and conquered them.  For him, there was no such thing as cowardice—­he never shirked.  He met every responsibility like a man, and never swerved aside.  He took his share, and more, of the world’s work, and did it nobly, as a man should do.

“His brusque manner concealed a great heart.  I fear that, at times, some of you may have misunderstood him.  There was no man in our community more deeply and lovingly the friend of us all, and there is no man among us more noble in thought and act than he.