On Memorial Day, when they came to the cemetery on the hill to decorate the soldiers' graves, men saw that the great mound of lilacs on Robert Hendricks' grave had withered. The seven days' wonder of his passing was ended. The business that he had left prospered without him, or languished and died; within a week in all but a dozen hearts Hendricks' memory began to recede into the past, and so, where there had been a bubble on the tide, that held in its prism of light for a brief bit of eternity all of God's spectacle of life, suddenly there was only the tide moving resistlessly toward the unknown shore. And thus it is with all of us. CHAPTER XXVIII In the summer of 1904, following the death of Robert Hendricks, John Barclay spent much time in the Ridge, more time than he had spent there for thirty years. For in the City he was a marked man. Every time the market quivered, reporters rushed to get his opinion about the cause of the disturbance; the City papers were full of stories either of his own misdeeds, or of the wrong-doings of other men of his caste. His cronies were dying all about him of broken hearts or wrecked minds, and it seemed to him that the word "indictment" was in every column of every newspaper, was on every man's lips, and literally floated in the air. So he remained in Sycamore Ridge much of the time, and every fair afternoon he rowed himself up the mill-pond to fish. He liked to be alone; for when he was alone, he could fight the battle in his soul without interruption. The combat had been gathering for a year; a despair was rising in him, that he concealed from his womenkind--who were his only intimate associates in those days--as if it had been a crime. But out on the mill-pond alone, casting minnows for bass, he could let the melancholy in his heart rage and battle with his sanity, without let or hindrance. His business was doing well; the lawsuits against the company in a dozen states were not affecting dividends, and the department in charge of his charities was forwarding letters of condolence and consolation from preachers and college presidents, and men who under the old regime had been in high walks of life. Occasionally some conservative newspaper or magazine would praise him and his company highly; but he knew the shallowness of all the patter of praise. He knew that he paid for it in one way or another, and he grew cynical; and in his lonely afternoons on the river, often he laughed at the whole mockery of his career, smiled at the thought of organized religion, licking his boots for money like a dog for bones, and then in his heart he said there is no God. Once, to relieve the pain of his soul's woe, he asked aloud, who is God, anyway, and then laughed as he thought that the bass nibbling at his minnow would soon think he, John Barclay, was God. The analogy pleased him, and he thought that his own god, some devilish fate, had the string through