"We must save it," he whispered confidentially, "save it for to-morrow." In vain they tried to reassure him; the haunting poverty that had stalked beside him in life refused to be banished by death. Mrs. Clarke remained "the lady" to him to the end. When he spoke to her, his manner assumed a faint dignity, with a slight touch of gallantry, the unmistakable air of a gentleman of the old school towards an attractive stranger of the opposite sex. His happiest hours were those when he fancied the children were with him. "Gently! gently!" he would say; "there is room for everybody. This knee is for Gussie Gorman, this one for Joe, because they are the smallest, you know. Now are you ready?" And then he would whisper fairy stories, smiling at the ceiling, and making feeble gestures with his wasted old hands. The end came one day after he had lain for hours in a stupor. He stirred suddenly and asked for his violin. "I must go--to the--theater, Nancy," he murmured. "I--do not want--to be--a--burden." They laid the instrument in his arms, and his fingers groped feebly over the strings; then his chin sank into its old accustomed place, and a great light dawned in his eyes. Mr. Demry, who was used to seeing invisible things, had evidently caught the final vision. That night, worn with nursing and full of grief for the passing of her old friend, Nance threw a coat about her and slipped out on the terrace. Above her, nebulous stars were already appearing, and their twinkling was answered by responsive gleams in the city below. Against the velvety dusk two tall objects towered in the distance, the beautiful Gothic spire of the cathedral, and the tall, unseemly gas pipe of Clarke's Bottle Factory. Between them, under a haze of smoke and grime, lay Calvary Alley. "I don't know which is worse," thought Nance fiercely, "to be down there in the mess, fighting and struggling and suffering to get the things you want, or up here with the mummies who haven't got anything left to wish for. I wish life wasn't just a choice between a little hard green apple and a rotten big one!"