Whose waking is supremely blest.
No fear nor foe shall dim the hour
That manifests the Savior's power.
Asleep in Jesus! Oh, for me
May such a blissful refuge be!
Securely shall my ashes lie
And wait the summons from the sky.
The sweet voice of the singer died away, and the stillness was broken only by low sobbing. Then the minister arose.
Gilbert Allison had seen enough. The plain, dark coffin just before the altar railing told him that another human soul had left its earthly body and had gone beyond.
He was not interested in this. His mind dwelt on the singer. She was rather small, a well-formed and graceful appearing young woman of perhaps twenty-two or twenty-four. She wore a plain dark dress, and a round hat rested on the masses of red-brown hair that framed her face and crowned her shapely head. Here and there in the mass a carved silver hair-pin showed itself, and Gilbert Allison found himself studying the effect as he walked down the street; found himself puzzled as to why he had stopped and noticed her hair or her. Evidently she had made an impression on him. He tried, in a way, to analyze this, and finally gave it up, yet found himself continually recalling the face in its frame of red-brown hair.