As Mr. Florsheimer of the Gents' Furnishing remarked to Miss Murphy of the Silks: "Such a loss to trade, ain't she?" Among these humbler friends not a few genuine tears were shed, however, for Effie May had scattered her kindness impartially. Joan, in solitary state as chief mourner, with the Misses Darcy sadly rustling in the pew behind her, was conscious of many curious glances turned her way. Perhaps her husband was the only person there whose eyes never turned in her direction. She was glad of her heavy veil, through which she might study him unobserved. He sat just opposite among the other pall-bearers, grave and quiet, with the odd dignity still about him which had come at the time of his disgrace. She noted new lines in his face, an unexpected touch of gray in his boyish, curling hair. The ears, the freckles, the great, clumsy hands were still much in evidence; but somehow Archie had lost forever his slight touch of the ridiculous. Declining to run away from disgrace, facing his music, humbly but unafraid, it occurred to Joan that her husband was approaching rather nearly her own and her father's standard of gentlehood. "Blessings brighten," she reminded herself, grimly, "as they take their flight!..." She came presently under the soothing spell of the old cathedral, a shabby, not very beautiful edifice left stranded in a neighborhood no longer its own, but whose pews still bore the names of the town's first citizens, gentlemen who had been her father's boyhood playmates, and whose fathers had worshiped there with his father. Oddly enough, considering how little time she had spent within its walls, the echoing dimness of it gave Joan her first sense of home-coming. This old house of God, that had witnessed so many ends and so many beginnings of human endeavor, had gathered into itself the heart of a city. A warm heart, it was, thought Joan; despite those speculative glances fixed upon her. She recalled people's kindness to Archie in his trouble, their quick response to any call upon their sympathy, their willingness to give every stranger his chance. She remembered their invincible hospitality, whether in wealth or poverty; the ardor with which they entered into the interest of the moment, be it work or play, their generous admiration for any fellow-citizen who made a success in the world. A warm heart, she thought, and a loyal one. She understood in that moment why it was that the people of this little city rarely drifted too far away to come back again. Just as the human body claims in the end its six feet of earth for a resting-place, so must the human spirit claim its bit of the world for a resting-place, a Neighborhood. The tragedy of a wandering life such as Nikolai's was, she saw, in its detachment from common human interests, from a Neighborhood. Better a tree, with its roots in friendly soil, as he had once said. Cast her out though it might, Joan knew that her Neighborhood was here, here among her father's people....