It was a combination van and hearse with the coffin under the driver's box, and John Storm (as the only discoverable mourner) with the undertaker on the seat inside.
“Will ye be willin' ter tyke the service at the cimitery, sir?” said the undertaker, and John answered that he would.
The grave was on the paupers' side, and when the undertaker, with his man, had lowered the coffin to its place, he said, “They've gimme abart three more funerals this morning, so I'll leave ye now, sir, to finish 'er off.”
At the next moment John Storm in his surplice was alone with the dead, and had opened his book to read the burial service which no other human ear was to hear.
He read “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” and then the bitter loneliness of the pauper's doom came down on his soul and silenced him.
But his imprisoned passion had to find a vent, and that night he wrote to the Prime Minister: “I begin to understand what you meant when you said I was in the wrong place. Oh, this London, with its society, its worldly clergy, its art, its literature, its luxury, its idle life, all built on the toil of the country and compounded of the sweat of the nameless poor! Oh, this 'Circe of cities,' drawing good people to it, decoying them, seducing them, and then turning them into swine! It seems impossible to live in the world and to be spiritually-minded. When I try to do so I am torn in two.”
X.
On the following Tuesday evening two young men were dining in their chambers in St. James's Street. One of them was Lord Robert Ure; the other was his friend and housemate, Horatio Drake. Drake was younger than Lord Robert by some seven or eight years, and also beyond comparison more attractive. His face was manly and handsome, its expression was open and breezy; he was broad-shouldered and splendidly built, and he had the fair hair and blue eyes of a boy.