Then Quarry rose with some pomp and spoke thus: “Ladies and friends: Some lives is all chair-cars and champagne; some lives is neither. I’m not saying what they are, for this is no time to start more tears. Some feels the whip, some wears the willow, some gets their own way. These last says the skimpiest ‘Glory be to God!’ “This house is a house of mourning. The one ewe lamb went to the pasture, and come home bit by the wolf! Here to-day, there to-morrow! Our God is a very fearful thing!” Quarry was considered an orator in Soot City. He always spoke at social functions and stirred his audiences. “This man”--here the blackest Polack snorted like the report of firearms, and every one at the sound burst into weeping--“this man,” screamed Quarry, strengthening his effect, “was a good man! He knew ten at night as well as the town clock. He was a Christian gentleman, and done as well by his friends as he did by the chapel, and what more can a man do? In passing out, those that knowed him good, or any of the men that were pretty common with him, can put their hands on his hand, as some has the feelin’ it’s best.” Thereupon Quarry made way for himself to the kitchen table, and stood striving against a triumph so strong that it seemed a physical sensation. And Jarlsen lay scorched, inert, and blasted. To any one knowing the old Saxon custom of touching a corpse as a means of finding its unconfessed murderer the scene would have been more intense from the moment that the first hand--a woman’s--was laid on the least sore member of Jarlsen’s wrecked body. None but Miss Bentley knew that the custom was a primitive habit of the race. She alone had a vision of spurting blood as the guilty hand touched its victim. That vision was usual to her at the blast rites, and she felt a strange thrill of uncertainty when she put her own innocent, helping hand on a blasted labourer. The greater part of the crowd strolled off, subdued, into the bright morning. The rest lingered to lay hands on an old friend. Jarlsen, the man who had given his ear to their sorrows and lent his high, searching voice to all their social joys, was virtually dead to them; and it was in tense silence that the heavy-footed workmen approached the table. Then there would be a sobbing sigh, and some one would pass out at the door. Few people can touch the dead without tears, and as Jerry Black said, “The blasts is dead men with live tongues.” They had all gone; the room grew light as the crowd moved from the windows. Sunlight bathed the floor at Emma’s feet, and Black stood beside her, knowing she feared to be without him when Jarlsen was deaf to her and Quarry spoke his kind of love to her, and her father was only a peevish old child. Quarry laid a nervous hand on Jarlsen, who had been roused more than once through his tactile sense as some old friend’s hand had lain for a moment on his.