In very truth he had become a child again. The fair weak face wore a look of youth and innocence. The light, shiny hair, scarcely ruffled from its careful arrangement of the morning, had on it baby tints of sunshine, and under the blonde moustache lurked the remnant of the childishly sweet smile that lighted his face when Mrs. Doring saw him go singing down the stairs two hours before. The placid form before her was his semblance, indeed, but it was not he. That mysterious fact Cartice realized in an instant. There were his clay garments, but all that was he was gone. The funeral took place two days later. Mrs. Doring could not be present, for she was unable to raise her head from the pillow. Thoughts of the great mystery which had just touched elbows with her haunted her all the time. The “narrow sea that divides the heavenly land from ours,” what was it like? What shore touched it on the other side? Was there a heavenly land or any land beyond that dark ocean? And where was Colonel Layton now? No answer to these perplexing queries came. And yet, perhaps an answer always comes could we but read it. Perhaps it came to Mrs. Doring, for as she lay there wondering about it, a calm came upon her, and in imagination she saw Colonel Layton as he stood at the top of the stairs on the day they talked together about this greatest of all problems, and heard him say, “I am not afraid. It seems all right.” Far down within herself she heard the echo, “all right! all right!” and then she saw again the Colonel’s childish smile, and he repeated assuringly, “Yes, it’s all right.” * * * * * Chrissalyn went to live with a friend and determined to find a way to earn her bread. The end of one path through which she had sought happiness was reached and only sadness and disappointment were there. Now she must look for others, for the endless quest goes on, clear to the grave itself and possibly beyond. When she with the last scrap of her possessions was gone and her apartments left solitary, Cartice felt a sense of desolation greater than she had known since she and the Butterfly had been friends. Life is as inexorable as death; its separations are often more cruel. In the office of the _Register_ the final fate of man was a subject often under discussion. Prescott snorted in derision at any mention of a continuance of life in a sphere invisible to us now. “We die and turn to dust, like the worm,” he said. Cartice held to the hope of something more than we have here--a sequel to this life, or a continuation of it, but she could advance no basis for the hope which he considered tenable.