A trolley-car clanged past, and the challenge of the peanutman came cheerfully in at the open door. "Pop-corn, Lady? Yere's your fine fraish roasted peanuts, right off the hopper!" The little lads in the choir stirred restlessly to this voice of the summer outside. "Lead, Kindly Light," they warbled in a piercing young treble, with now and then the Bishop's robust tones added in a hospitable effort to make the thing go. Joan's irrepressible fancy recalled the last occasion on which she had heard this noble anthem. It was at the Country Club, where some irreverent wag was playing it in rag-time; and Effie May had danced to it merrily, Lightfoot Ef with her indulgent Major. Joan wondered whether Lightfoot Ef might be remembering, too, and smiling perhaps in her coffin.... But out at the cemetery her queer sense of elation vanished. Here, in the shadow of her father's monolith, with Mary's modest headstone on one side, a yawning grave on the other, at her feet two mounds so small as hardly to be noticed, the aloneness of the human soul suddenly smote her with such force that she could not stand under it. Was she never to know again that human touch of hands and of lips? Was her only neighborhood after all to be this quiet city of the dead? She went quite dizzy and might have fallen, but for the quick arm that supported her; whose in that bitter moment she neither knew nor cared. But she was not surprised to find herself presently alone in a carriage with Archie. "I guess I oughtn't to have done this," he apologized, when he saw that she could listen to him. "I just didn't think--out there. I'll go as soon as you feel better, dear. Where do you want the driver to take you!" "Home," she said. It was no more than a whisper. "You mean to Mrs. Darcy's house? Won't that be pretty gloomy for you just now? Better let him take you to your cousins'--or to Miss Emily's. How would that be? I know she'd he mighty glad to have you." Joan gathered herself together for an effort. It seemed to her, faint as she was, that much depended upon this moment. But for once her eloquence failed her. She could only repeat that she wanted to go home. Archie understood her trembling better than her speech, perhaps. He, too, began to tremble. "I--I haven't got any home now, Joan. Only the old attic-room in Poplar Street--" She cried out, painfully, "Archie! don't you _want_ me any more?..." In his arms at last, her face pressed roughly against the familiar roughness of his coat, words returned to her. She quoted her husband's sole adventure into poetry: "A book of verses underneath the roof, A cup of coffee and an egg, in troof, And Mrs Neal to cook it up for us-- Ah, attic life were Paradise enoof." Archibald did his faithful best to laugh; but the effort was not successful. * * * * *