coat, he was recalling with a certain sense of luxury past, journeys
in four-wheeled cabs--occasions when, seated beside a box corded and
secured with sealing-wax, he had taken his master's plate for safety to
the bank; occasions when, under a roof piled up with guns and boxes, he
had sat holding the "Honorable Bateson's" dog; occasions when, with
some young person by his side, he had driven at the tail of a baptismal,
nuptial, or funeral cortege. These memories of past grandeur came back
to him with curious poignancy, and for some reason the words kept rising
in his mind: 'For richer or poorer, for better or worser, in health
and in sick places, till death do us part.' But in the midst of the
exaltation of these recollections the old heart beneath his old red
flannel chest-protector--that companion of his exile--twittering faintly
at short intervals, made him look at the woman by his side. He longed to
convey to her some little of the satisfaction he felt in the fact that
this was by no means the low class of funeral it might have been. He
doubted whether, with her woman's mind, she was getting all the comfort
she could out of three four-wheeled cabs and a wreath of lilies. The
seamstress's thin face, with its pinched, passive look, was indeed
thinner, quieter, than ever. What she was thinking of he could not tell.
There were so many things she might be thinking of. She, too, no doubt,
had seen her grandeur, if but in the solitary drive away from the church
where, eight years ago, she and Hughs had listened to the words
now haunting Creed. Was she thinking of that; of her lost youth and
comeliness, and her man's dead love; of the long descent to shadowland;
of the other children she had buried; of Hughs in prison; of the girl
that had "put a spell on him"; or only of the last precious tugs the
tiny lips at rest in the first four-wheeled cab had given at her breast?
Or was she, with a nicer feeling for proportion, reflecting that, had
not people been so kind, she might have had to walk behind a funeral
provided by the parish?