gaze
lowered upon the floor. He was a burly man, with a heavy countenance
impassive as an oriental's, out of which, startling in its unexpected
rapidity, a glance flashed and stabbed as steely as Loyola's sword. His
hands were clasped before him; they were, in that environment, strangely
white, and covered with the scars of what, patently, were unaccustomed
employments.

"It feels good inside," Gordon observed tritely. He noted uneasily the
muddy tracks his shoes had printed upon the otherwise spotless board
floor, "I got caught in a gust on the mountain," he explained awkwardly,
in a constraint which deepened with the other's continued silence; "I
ought to have cleaned up before I came in ... it's terrible dark out." He
rose, tentatively, but the priest waved him back into the chair. Opening a
door opposite the one by which Gordon had entered, and which obviously
gave upon an outer shed, Merlier procured a roughly made mop; and,
returning, he obliterated all traces of the mud. Suddenly, to Gordon's
dismay, his supreme discomfort, he stooped to a knee, and began to remove
the former's shoes.

"Hey!" Gordon protested; "don't do that; I can tend to my own feet." He
was prepared to kick out, but he recognized that a struggle could only
make the situation insufferable, and he submitted in an acute, writhing
misery to the ministrations. The priest rose with Gordon's shoes and
placed them, together with the mop, outside the door. He then brought from
an inner room an immaculate, white cambric shirt, a pair of trousers, old
but carefully ironed, and knitted, grey worsted slippers.

"If you will change," he said in a low, impersonal voice, "I will see what
there is for you to eat." He left the room, and Gordon gratefully shifted
into the fresh, dry clothes. The trousers were far too large; they
belonged, he recognized, to the priest, but he belted them into baggy
folds. The other appeared shortly with a wooden tray bearing a platter of
cooked, yellow beans, a part loaf of coarse bread, raw eggs and a pitcher
of milk. "I thought," he explained, "you would wish something immediately;
there is no fire; Bartamon is out." The latter, Gordon knew, was a
sharp-witted old man who had made a precarious living in the local fields
and woodsheds until the priest had taken him as a general helper. "There
are neither coffee nor tea in the house," Merlier stated further.

He closed the book, moved the lamp to the end of the table, and stoo