Very carefully the limp form was carried to the car and deposited on the soft cushions of the back seat. Hessel got in beside it and took his friend’s hand, which felt to him deathly cold. The owner of the car got in beside the driver and in less than two minutes they had reached Queen Anne’s Gate. Fortunately, as Hessel thought, Inez was not in and Sir Garth was carried into the morning-room and laid on the big sofa. There was no lift in the house and Hessel did not like, he told Golpin, to risk the climb to the second floor. Within ten minutes Sir Horace Spavage had arrived. One glance at the white and agonized face was enough. “Dear, dear!” he said. “So soon?” Kneeling down by the sofa, he picked up one of his patient’s hands, held the wrist for a few seconds between his fingers and thumb, and laid it quietly down again. Then, undoing the front of the shirt and vest, he laid his hand on the bare chest and tapped it firmly with the rigid fingers of his other hand. Even to Hessel’s untutored ears, the sound produced was curiously muffled and dull. Sir Horace rose slowly to his feet, putting away the stethoscope which he had automatically slipped round his neck. “Yes; as I thought,” he said. “The aneurism has burst.” The funeral of Sir Garth Fratten took place on the following Monday. The actual burial was at Brooklands and was attended only by members of the family and a few close personal friends. Ryland and Inez were the chief mourners, Ryland looking very subdued and unhappy, and Inez worn out with misery but erect and calm—and very beautiful in her black clothes. A few distant cousins had come to establish a relationship which the dead man had allowed to remain distant during his life, whilst Leopold Hessel, Laurence Mangane, Sir Horace Spavage, and Mr. Septimus Menticle, the family solicitor, were also present. In London a memorial service was held at St. Ethelberta’s, one of Wren’s most beautiful—and threatened—City churches. The church was packed with City men of all types and standings. A Director of the Bank of England was present to represent that august institution officially, together with members of the committees of Lloyds and the Stock Exchange. All the directors of Fratten’s Bank, except of course Hessel, were there, and Major-General Sir Hunter Lorne, a notable figure even among men of note, represented the Victory Finance Company. Every member of the staff of Fratten’s Bank, which was closed for the day—a unique circumstance—was there, from the chief cashier to the latest-joined stamp-licker. The City felt that one of its big men had gone—one of the fast-disappearing pre-war type—and it was, beneath its inscrutable surface, genuinely moved.