virtues of the dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved
husband, in new black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious
undertaker kept moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his
trade.

During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the floor
at Sam's feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to distract
his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of the weeping
women, none of whom had before been in the house and all of whom he
thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of privacy. The
note was from John Telfer.

"I will not come to your mother's funeral," he wrote. "I respected your
mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she is
dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in
Wildman's, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the
moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore's shop, I will
go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If he
or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their
friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know
that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take
them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of the
dead."

The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something
that had slipped from him.

"It is good sense, after all," he thought, and realised that even in the
days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the fact
that Jane McPherson's long, hard role was just being played out to the