Together, silently, they bore him to the grave, still wrapped in the cloak which now had become his shroud. Once more they gazed upon the noble face of him they had grown to love in the long weeks of the Abyss, when only he had understood them or seemed near.
“What is this, Allan?” asked the girl, touching a fine chain of gold about the patriarch's neck, till now unnoticed.
Allan drew at the chain, and a small golden cylinder was revealed, curiously carven. Its lightness told him it was hollow.
“Some treasure of his, I imagine,” judged he.
“Some record, perhaps? Oughtn't we to look?”
He thought a moment in silence, then detached the chain.
“Yes,” said he. “It can't help him now. It may help us. He himself would have wanted us to have it.”
And into the pocket of his rough, brown cassock, woven of the weed-fiber of the dark sea, he slid the chain and golden cylinder.
A final kiss they gave the patriarch, each; then, carefully wrapping his face so that no smallest particle of sand should come in contact with it, stood up. At each other they gazed, understandingly.
“Flowers? Some kind of service?” asked the girl.