old, neglected, worn-out. I wish I was dead." He had been
talking half to himself, but he turned to Westray and said: "Forgive me
for being peevish; you'll be peevish, too, when you come to my age--at
least, if you're as poor then as I am, and as lonely, and have nothing
to look forward to. Come along."

They stepped out into the dark--for night had fallen--and plashed along
the flagged path which glimmered like a white streamlet between the dark
turves.

"I will take you a short-cut, if you don't mind some badly-lighted
lanes," said the organist, as they left the churchyard; "it's quicker,
and we shall get more shelter." He turned sharply to the left, and
plunged into an alley so narrow and dark that Westray could not keep up
with him, and fumbled anxiously in the obscurity. The little man
reached up, and took him by the arm. "Let me pilot you," he said; "I
know the way. You can walk straight on; there are no steps."

There was no sign of life, nor any light in the houses, but it was not
till they reached a corner where an isolated lamp cast a wan and
uncertain light that Westray saw that there was no glass in the windows,
and that the houses were deserted.

"It's the old part of the town," said the organist; "there isn't one
house in ten with anyone in it now. All we fashionables have moved
further up. Airs from the river are damp, you know, and wharves so very
vulgar."

They left the narrow street, and came on to what Westray made out to be
a long wharf skirting the river. On the right stood abandoned
warehouses, square-fronted, and huddled together like a row of gigantic
packing-cases; on the left they could hear the gurgle of the current
among the mooring-posts, and the flapping of the water against the quay
wall, where the east wind drove the wavelets up the river. The lines of
what had once been a horse-tramway still ran along the quay, and the
pair had some ado to thread their way without tripping, till a low
building on the right broke the line of lofty warehouses. It seemed to
be a church or chapel, having mullioned windows with stone tracery, and
a bell-turret at the west end; but its most marked feature was a row of
heavy buttresses which shored up the side facing the road. They were
built of brick, and formed triangles with the ground and the wall which
they supported. The shadows hung heavy under the building, but where
all else was black the recesses between the buttresses were blackest