and slunk home night after night bitter and dejected; many of whom had
listened, jeeringly perhaps, to his grievance against the world, though
it were in some sort their own. Death, for them, had ennobled him. The
little girl whom Hodder had met with the pitcher of beer came tiptoeing
with a wilted bunch of pansies, picked heaven knows where; stolen, maybe,
from one of the gardens of the West End. Carnations, lilies of the
valley, geraniums even--such were the offerings scattered loosely on the
lid until a woman came with a mass of white roses that filled the room
with their fragrance,--a woman with burnished red hair. Hodder started
as he recognized her; her gaze was a strange mixture of effrontery and
--something else; sorrow did not quite express it. The very lavishness of
her gift brought to him irresistibly the reminder of another offering.
. . . . She was speaking.

"I don't blame him for what he done--I'd have done it, too, if I'd been
him. But say, I felt kind of bad when I heard it, knowing about the kid,
and all. I had to bring something--"

Instinctively Hodder surmised that she was in doubt as to the acceptance
of her flowers. He took them from her hand, and laid them at the foot of
the coffin.

"Thank you," he said, simply.

She stared at him a moment with the perplexity she had shown at times on
the night he visited her, and went out. . .

Funerals, if they might be dignified by this name, were not infrequent
occurrences in Dalton Street, and why this one should have been looked
upon as of sufficient importance to collect a group of onlookers at the