The man sat a long while in the silent room, while the night came down and the gloom increased. Out of the dusk, under the shadow of fruit-trees, within beck of a red rose, Gabriel beheld two women standing, fair women whose faces seemed to cleanse the world. Horror and despair seemed to faint away like black waters ebbing from before their feet. For in either hand there was a lamp, golden-tongued and stately, Faith out of Heaven. The singing had ceased in the room below, and over the myriad roofs rose the solemn arch of the moon. Gabriel watched it climb the sky, till it seemed to hang like a mighty halo behind the iron cross of a church. XLII THEY buried Zeus Gildersedge in Saltire churchyard, Mr. Mince officiating, bleating through the burial service with his usual sentimental unction. “Earth to earth, and dust to dust.” Good gold also to the greedy, and the dead man’s store consecrated to strangers and to hirelings. Thus Zeus Gildersedge, who had never given a penny away gladly in his life, went to his last resting-place, and, Lazarus-like, lay in Charity’s bosom, while his child was barred out from before the gates of “the worthy.” There was a goodly gathering about the grave, for the funeral had excited the curiosity of the villagers. Mrs. Mince was there in black gloves and black bonnet; also James Marjoy, pulling his ragged mustache; also his wife, eying creation irritably through her brimming glasses. Mrs. Primmer, hard mouthed and self-satisfied, stood beside the gravestone of a girl who had died in child-bed, dabbing her eyes at intervals with a large, white handkerchief. To judge by the dignity of the display, Zeus Gildersedge might have been one of the most respected of patriarchs, a man whose sympathies had fathomed the woes of many a poor fellow’s pocket. At the end thereof, the crowd dwindled through the lych-gate, under the green chestnut-trees, and by the school-house where the children were at work. Mrs. Primmer, whose tongue had been busy ascribing Zeus Gildersedge’s death to his daughter’s “shocking interference,” accompanied Mrs. Mince up Saltire High Street to the vicarage. Mrs. Primmer carried a little black hand-bag, wherein lay the handkerchief she had used at the funeral, her post-office savings book, and several trinkets she had appropriated from Joan’s bedroom at Burnt House. Mrs. Primmer, in acknowledgment of her many virtues, was to be received once more at the vicarage as cook. Dr. Marjoy and his wife drove home together, uninspired above their mean level of materialism by the miser’s funeral. The suggestiveness of the scene had been lost upon them—the subtlety of those significant words, “dust to dust.” They discussed the profits of the case over the tea-table, discussed it with that complacency that had accustomed them to existing upon the misfortunes of others.