There were five persons in all: two men and three women.

Only two interested him--Zadok, with whom he had already made a superficial acquaintance and had had one bout; and a smart, bright-eyed girl with a resolute mouth softened by an insistent dimple, who struck him as possessing excellent sense and some natural cleverness.

A girl to know and a girl to talk to, was his instantaneous judgment.

Then he forgot everything but the solemnity of the occasion, for the clergyman had entered and taken his place, and a great hush had fallen upon the rooms and upon every heart there present.
"_I am the resurrection and the life_." Never had these consoling words sounded more solemn than when they rang above the remains of Adelaide Cumberland, in this home where she had reigned as mistress ever since her seventeenth year.

The nature of the tragedy which had robbed the town of one of its most useful young women; the awful fate impending over its supposed author,--a man who had come and gone in these rooms with a spell of fascination to which many of those present had themselves succumbed--the brooding sense of illness, if not of impending death, in the room above; gave to these services a peculiar poignancy which in some breasts of greater susceptibility than the rest, took the form of a vague expectancy bordering on terror.
Sweetwater felt the poignancy, but did not suffer from the terror.