As Grannan bent forward to pick it up, he observed a single white flower that had fallen from the wreaths piled upon the coffin, and gathered this in his hand also. He started to offer it to her; but, observing the thoughtful, troubled look upon her face, refrained. They had now stopped; and, a moment later when in a fit of abstraction he was attempting to pinion the flower to the lapel of his coat, she involuntarily seized his hand. “What is it?” he asked. Her face crimsoned as she instantly withdrew her hand, and struggled for composure. “Why—er, it’s bad luck,” she exclaimed. “What’s bad luck?” asked he, with that peculiar tone of voice indicating that there was no answer for his query. “Oh, nothing; silliness, mere nonsense,” she said, betraying signs of her agitation which Grannan, however, failed to discover. “And now,” she continued, “I must say good-bye, for you are going away, you say, and I must thank you, oh, I can’t say how much, for your offer of the beautiful horse.” “And, do you really mean that you will not accept my gift?” he said, slowly. She bit her lip and bent her eyes downward, while she moved the point of her shoe restlessly upon the stone paving. “O, I might manage,” she at length began, hesitatingly, “if only to gratify your whim, to keep it, for a while; but—” “You see,” he interrupted, “I wanted you to have something to remind—” “Good-bye,” she repeated, smiling as she gave him her hand. “So you really go away to-morrow?” “At once,” he said, gravely, as he pressed the hand she was now withdrawing from his own, and turned away. She paused within the vestibuled entrance of the cathedral in what proved to be a vain endeavor to calm the turbulency of her feelings. The fingers of her gloved hand were still deadened by the pressure from which she had just released them. Her eyes had even mastered her will, and now sought with the intensity of eagerness, the dim outlines of a figure that was now lost amid the throng, now faintly visible, with its downcast head and slowly receding step. At last it vanished. The unsteady, subdued, solemn tones of the great organ within again rolled tumultuously upon her. She stood struggling, as it were, with the overwhelming waves of sound. Both her eyes and memory seemed now to focus upon a receding past. The dead face of her husband drifted from out the vacancy, so real that she started, stopped, then started again, slowly descending the steps. She turned her face homeward. Unconscious of the tide of restless passers-by, and of the noise that roared imprisoned by the walls of the high buildings on either side of the street, she turned abstractedly from the square, lost in the depths of her meditations.