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"Well, I won't worry about it anyhow till Carmichael has⁠—Hullo! hit him on the back, Gordon." For Carmichael had been overtaken by one of those choking fits which the best-behaved of us are liable to.

"It's a curious thing," he gasped on recovering, "that one always used to say, when one was small, that one's drink had 'gone the wrong way.' Nothing at all to do with the wind-pipe, I believe."

The funeral was, it must be confessed, a riot of irony. The members who attended had decided that it would look bad to take their clubs with them to the churchyard, but their costumes were plainly a compromise between respect for the dead and a determination to get on with business as soon as it was over. None of them had any tears to shed. The village of Paston Oatvile turned out to a child in sheer morbidity, to see "'im as fell down off of the railway put away." The sonorous assurances of the burial service had to be read out in full earshot of the village green on which, little more than a week ago, Brotherhood had laboriously disproved the doctrine of personal immortality. To these same solemn cadences the great lords of Oatvile, ever since they abandoned the Old Faith under William III, had been laid to rest within these same walls⁠—

—and yet there had been a sort of feudal dignity about their manner of departing. But this unknown