"My mother's!" cried Aura gladly, "Oh! may I have it, grandfather?" Ted looked with distaste at the little mourning ring; just a plait of bronze brown hair like Aura's set in a plain gold rim as a background to "In Memoriam" in black enamel letters. "It is rather grisly," he whispered fondly as he slipped it on to the girl's finger, "but it will do to--to keep the place warm! By and by it shall be diamonds." She shook her head. "I shall like this best," she said, "it will remind me of----" And then she lifted her finger to her lips and kissed the little ring. It would be hers always to remind her of Love and Death, and Birth that came between the two. CHAPTER XVIII Poor Gwen's death had caused quite a pleasurable excitement in the village. There can be no question that to all save the immediate few whose natural emotions are involved, most deaths bring a quicker tide of life to the living. It has been said, indeed, that funerals are often the preludes to marriage. Be that as it may, Gwen, despite her gift of grace, had lived all her short life on such a different plane from the rest of the village girls that, except in the little shepherd's cottage amid the hills, few real tears were shed over her dramatic death. And it was so dramatic! To die in full song--to shed her life-blood in trying to bring the glad news to other souls. Surely that must avail! Surely that sacrifice must turn those sinful souls to peace. Though they did not know it, and for Mr. Sylvanus Smith's prospect of peace, it was as well he did not, both Aura and her grandfather were special objects of intercession at many hundreds of chapels the very next Sunday. For the story naturally grew in the telling. Meanwhile Gwen, poor soul, was laid with much fervour beside her baby, the rector duly officiating; for the old shepherd and his wife, thinking of their own funerals to come, held fast to tradition. Whatever else you might be in life, death brought you back to the Church, back to the solemn old service in which dust is reverently committed to dust, ashes to ashes. Nearly all the village attended, for, in a way, it was proud of Gwen. There was but one notable absence. Alicia Edwards was not there to take her part in singing "Day of Wrath" over her dead friend. She was in bed or at any rate confined to her room; for the dramatic death on New Year's morning had apparently been too much for her nerves. The gossips of the village went in and out, condoling with her, and applauding her sensibility, and retailing to her all the affecting particulars of the funeral, the wreaths, the remembrances from souls saved by the dead girl's singing, the excellence of the mournings provided by Myfanwy Jones, and the apparently real grief of Mervyn Pugh, who went about looking like a lost soul himself.