A sham funeral! Martin once prevailed on to be a party to it, the thing could have been managed as easy as apple-pie. Forbes wouldn’t boggle at such a trifle as falsifying a 216death-certificate. The Baxters were of the family, and Jean Baxter would have shrivelled up any undertaking person who might suggest that other hands than hers should lay out Mr Stevenson and chest him. Seven people were in the know—eight, if he counted in himself. And Hew was off and away.

The conviction was so powerful that Archie turned his head and stared across at the further hill as though he would see Hew on it, leaping and bounding like a hind let loose. Hew was young again, now that he wasn’t dead. A man of fifty has a lot of life under his waistcoat, and vitality would start up, fresh and strong, in a man who by his own artfulness and election had cleared himself from one life and begun another. Asked how he’d felt when he was dropped into France, Hew had replied, ‘Dropped. I lay there like a dropped calf. And then I knew I had legs and got up on them.’ Deposited in a new existence, Hew would do very well and get a lot of fun out of it.

Mustn’t grin all over my face at a funeral, thought Archie with a guilty start, and returned his attention to the ceremony. Veronica was again fidgeting with her bag, was she proposing to tip the grave-digger? Good God! If Veronica married again, she would be a bigamist. It seemed to be written in the stars that he would not be able to give his mind to this funeral, for now he was compelled to think about Veronica becoming a bigamist. Bigamy is worse than divorce: at any rate, Veronica, holding that nothing could be worse than divorce, would have to admit that bigamy was as bad. Unfortunately—no, that was no way to feel 217at a funeral, even a mock one—fortunately, she would never know. Martin was not likely to give Hew away, and nobody else would. There might be rather a fracas when the second marriage came to be discussed, but Martin would not be able to speak out his real reason for opposing it, and nothing short of the real reason would stop her. She would get her way, as usual, and live a happy bigamist ever after. What a funeral! He was amply recompensed for his long duteous career of being the family funeral hack. But the hacking was not over, he still had to drive Veronica to Edinburgh. What on earth could he find to talk about? And to sit without talking while bigamy burned in his bosom was a frightful risk, for she might say to him, as she had done on the way north, ‘Well, Archie?’—and if she so much as glimpsed a cat in the bag she would have no mercy on him.

Mr Guthrie had done and was walking away, everybody was moving; they would be silent till they were outside the graveyard, conversation would then begin with a few grunts, leading to restrained commendations of the dead and acknowledgments of a common mortality. Veronica’s attempts on the grave-digger having been headed off by Martin, she was now showing herself in charity towards the Church of Scotland.