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“What is this thing, Dominie; a man or a snake? Will I kill it?”

“Bartholomew,” I began. “When we–“

“Not a word from you, Dominie. My mind is made up.”

“The girl is Isabel Munn’s daughter.”

I saw a tremor shake the gaunt frame.

“When we buried Isabel Munn, you came back in the night to weep at her grave.”

He thrust out a warding hand toward me.

“Why did you weep over Isabel Munn’s grave, Bartholomew?”

“Speak no evil of the dead,” he cried wildly.

“It is not in my mind. She was a good and pure woman. What would she have been if she had listened to you?”

“What do you know? Who betrayed me?”

“You, yourself. When you came down with pneumonia after the burial, I sat with you through a night of delirium.”

Bartholomew Storrs bowed his head.

“My sin hath found me out,” he groaned. “God knows I loved her, and–and I hadn’t the strength not to tell her. I’d have given up everything for her, my hope of heaven, my–my–I ‘d have given up my office and gone away from God’s Acre! And that was twenty years ago. I–I don’t sleep o’ nights yet, for thinking.”

“Well, you ain’t the only one,” said the dull voice of Mr. Hines.

“You’re tempting me!” Bartholomew Storrs snarled at him. “You’re trying to make me false to my trust.”

“Just to let her lie by her mother, like her mother would ask you if she could.”

“Don’t say it to me!” He beat his head with his clenched hand. Recovering command of himself, he straightened up, taking a deep breath: “I must be guided by my conscience and my God,” he said professionally, and I noted a more reverent intonation given to the former than to the latter. A bad sign.

“Isabel Munn’s daughter, Bartholomew,” I reminded him.

Instead of replying he staggered out of the door. Through the window we saw him, a moment later, posting down the street, bareheaded and stony-eyed, like one spurred by tormenting thoughts.

“Will he do it, do you think?” queried the anxious-visaged Mr. Hines.

I shook my head in doubt. With a man like Bartholomew Storrs, one can never tell.

Old memories are restless companions for the old. So I found them that night. But there is balm for sleeplessness in the leafy quiet of Our Square. I went out to my bench, seeking it, and found an occupant already there.

“We ain’t the only ones that need a jab of dope, Dominie,” said Mr. Hines, hard and pink and hoarsely confidential as when I first saw him.

“No? Who else?” Though I suspected, of course.

“Old Gloom. He’s over in the Acre.”

“Did you meet him there? What did he say?”

“I ducked him. He never saw me. He was–well, I guess he was praying,” said Mr. Hines shamefacedly.

“Praying? At the Munn grave?”

“That’s it. Groaning and saying, ‘A sign, O Lord! Vouchsafe thy servant a sign!’ Kept saying it over and over.”

“For guidance to-morrow,” I murmured. “Mr. Hines, I’m not sure that I know Bartholomew Storrs’s God. Nor can I tell what manner of sign he might give, or with what meaning. But if I know my God, whom I believe to be the true God, your Minnie is safe with him.”

“Yeh? You’re a good guy, Dominie,” said Mr. Hines in his emotionless voice.

I took him home with me to sleep. But we did not sleep. We smoked.

Minnie Munn’s funeral morning dawned clear and fresh. No word came from Bartholomew Storrs. I tried to find him, but without avail.

“We’ll go through with it,” said Mr. Hines quietly.

How small and insignificant seemed our tiny God’s Acre, as the few mourners crept into it behind Minnie Munn’s body; the gravestones like petty dots upon the teeming earth, dwarfed by the overshadowing tenements, as if death were but an incident in the vast, unhasting, continuous sweep of life, as indeed perhaps it is. Then the grandeur of the funeral service, which links death to immortality, was bodied forth in the aged minister’s trembling voice, and by it the things which are of life were dwarfed to nothingness. But my uneasy mind refused to be bound by the words; it was concerned with Bartholomew Storrs, standing grim, haggard, inscrutable, beside the grave, his eyes upturned and waiting. Too well I knew for what he was waiting; his sign. So, too, did Mr. Hines, still hard, still pink, still impeccably tailored, and still clinging to his elegant lacquered cane, as he supported little, broken Mr. Munn, very pathetic and decorous in full black, even to the gloves.