“No. Pay me when the job’s finished and it has been set up. You want some sort of inscription, don’t you?”
“Yes. There’s her full name, age, place of birth, and so on,” she said, giving him a scrawled envelope. “I want some poetry, too— something that suits a young girl taken off like this.”
He pulled his tattered little book of inscriptions from a pigeonhole, and thumbed its pages, reading her a quatrain here and there. To each she shook her head. Finally, he said:
“How’s this one, Elizabeth?” He read:
She went away in beauty’s flower, Before her youth was spent; Ere life and love had lived their hour God called her, and she went.
Yet whispers Faith upon the wind: No grief to her was given. She left YOUR love and went to find A greater one in heaven.
“Oh, that’s lovely—lovely,” she said. “I want that one.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “I think that’s the best one.”
In the musty cool smell of his little office they got up. Her gallant figure reached his shoulder. She buttoned her kid gloves over the small pink haunch of her palms and glanced about her. His battered sofa filled one wall, the line of his long body was printed in the leather. She looked up at him. His face was sad and grave. They remembered.
“It’s been a long time, Elizabeth,” he said.
They walked slowly to the front through aisled marbles. Sentinelled just beyond the wooden doors, the angel leered vacantly down. Jannadeau drew his great head turtlewise a little further into the protective hunch of his burly shoulders. They went out on to the porch.
The moon stood already, like its own phantom, in the clear washed skies of evening. A little boy with an empty paper-delivery bag swung lithely by, his freckled nostrils dilating pleasantly with hunger and the fancied smell of supper. He passed, and for a moment, as they stood at the porch edge, all life seemed frozen in a picture: the firemen and Fagg Sluder had seen Gant, whispered,
