“I thought perhaps you hadn’t from your tone,” explained Madge. There had been whispered talk among the men, and when she rose the one who had first spoken to her came forward. He was nervous and stood stiffly.!

They had the little garden to themselves. The million lights of Paris shone below them. “The old story,” sighed Mr. Simson. “One of the customers happened to be passing last Wednesday when I was speaking on the Embankment. Heard my opinion of the middle classes?”

“It comes to the same thing, doesn’t it, dear?” she answered. “They are there, anyhow. And that is how He knows those who are willing to serve Him: by their being pitiful.” They still discussed their various plans for the amelioration and improvement of humanity; but there seemed less need for haste than they had thought. The world, Joan discovered, was not so sad a place as she had judged it. There were chubby, rogue-eyed children; whistling lads and smiling maidens; kindly men with ruddy faces; happy mothers crooning over gurgling babies. There was no call to be fretful and vehement. They would work together in patience and in confidence. God’s sun was everywhere. It needed only that dark places should be opened up and it would enter. Returning to the interior, Joan had duly admired the Cheyne monument, but had been unable to disguise her amusement before the tomb of Mrs. Colvile, whom the sculptor had represented as a somewhat impatient lady, refusing to await the day of resurrection, but pushing through her coffin and starting for Heaven in her grave-clothes. Pausing in front of the Dacre monument, Joan wondered if the actor of that name, who had committed suicide in Australia, and whose London address she remembered had been Dacre House just round the corner, was descended from the family; thinking that, if so, it would give an up-to-date touch to the article. She had fully decided now to write it. But Mary Stopperton could not inform her. They had ended up in the chapel of Sir Thomas More. He, too, had “given up things,” including his head. Though Mary Stopperton, siding with Father Morris, was convinced he had now got it back, and that with the remainder of his bones it rested in the tomb before them.