At the end there were sneering faces among the newspaper men. Helga wore an expression of piteous bewilderment; Dick Colton’s teeth were set hard; and Dolly Ravenden’s dark beauty glowed with suppressed wrath. To the surprise of all, as the minister closed, Professor Ravenden got to his feet hesitantly and nervously. “My friends,” he said, “before we part I wish to add a slight tribute to what little we may say of the dead. For me to speak to you of his qualifications of mind and character would be an impertinence. But as a follower of what we call science I have one word to speak. “To see the truth, exact and clear, is given to no human. Now and again are born and matured minds which solve some small portion of the great problem that we live in. These are the world’s master intellects, the Darwins, the Linnaeuses, the Cuviers, the Pasteurs. Borrowing their light, we perhaps may illuminate some tiny crevice, and thus pay our part of the human debt. That is the task to which the scientist sets his long and patient efforts. “And this is achieved how? By an instinct which asserts itself potently in a certain type of humanity, in the highest type which we know. For want of a better term, I may call it the truth-vocation. The truth-seeker may concern himself with the smallest scale of a moth’s wing; he may devote himself to the study of the human soul in its most profound recesses; or he may strive with the immediate facts of life. Lie his field of endeavour where it may, his is the one great calling. Your friend and my friend who lies dead before us was of that world-old army. He died under its flag and on the field of honour. “His part was to seek the truth in the whirling incidents of the moment. With what complete absorption and self-forgetfulness he gave himself to the task, you know better than I. Perhaps you do not know, as I did not until after his death, that he clung to his appointed work against the ravages of a slow, pain-racked and mortal illness. The great Master of Destiny whose universe proceeds by immutable laws has seen no priest of old called to martyrdom, no prophet risen to warn the nations, no discoverer inspired to enlarge the ken of mankind, with a truer vocation than the seeker in a lesser field whom we honour here. “He has gone to his own place. Whether he still seeks or has found, is not for us. For us is the legacy of a single-minded devotion and a straightforward nobility of character that cannot but have made and left its impress wherever exerted.”