ull, smooth cheek, the drooping
gaze, against the green radiance of the lamp.

"If you will drink," Merlier said in a bitter, repressed voice, "if you
will indulge the flesh, don't whimper at the price." He made a gesture,
indicating the bed, then returned to his reading.

"The man doesn't live who's heard me whimper," Gordon began loudly; but
his angry protest trailed into silence. There was no comfort, no redress,
to be obtained from that absorbed, ungainly figure. He slipped out of the
baggy trousers, the worsted slippers, and, extending himself on the couch,
fell heavily asleep.

XXIII

When he woke the room was bright with narrow strips of sun, already too
high to shine broadly through the doors and windows. His clothes, dry and
comparatively clean, reposed on a chair at his side, and, washing in the
basin which he found outside the door, he hastily dressed. He looked,
tentatively, for the priest, but found only his aged helper in the
roughly-cleared space at the back of the house.

Bartamon was a small man, with a skull-like head, to the hollows of which,
the bony projections, dark skin clung dryly; his eyes were mere dimming
glints of watery consciousness; and from the sleeves of a faded blue
shirt, the folds of formless, canvas trousers, knotted, blackish hands,
grotesque feet, appeared to hang jerking on wires.

"Where's the Father?" Gordon inquired.

The other rested from the laborious sawing of a log, blinking and
tremulous in the hard brilliancy of midday. "Beyond," he answered vaguely,
waving up the valley; "Sim Caley's wife sent for him from Hollidew's farm.
Sim or his wife think they're going to die two or three times the year,
and bother the Father.... But I wouldn't wonder they would, and them
working for Hollidew, dawn, day and dark, with never a proper skinful of
food, only this and that, maybe, chick'ry and fat pork and moldy ends of
nothing."

He filled the blackened ruin of a pipe, shaking in his palsied fingers,
clasped it in mumbling, toothless gums: he was so sere, so juiceless, that
the smoke trailing from his sunken lips might well have been the
spontaneous conflagration of his desiccated interior.

"Hollidew's a terrible man for money," he continued, "it hurts him like a
cut with a hick'ry to see a dollar go. They say he won't hear tell of
quitting his fortune for purgatory, no, nor for heaven neither. He can't
get him to make a will, the lawyer can't. He was telling the Fat