d cypresses,
intent on seeing the Jenkins tomb for himself. No one could suspect
anything from merely seeing him there, and all he wanted was one glance
at the ancient monument.

But Bryce was not to give even one look at Richard Jenkins's tomb that
day, nor the next, nor for many days--death met him in another form
before he had taken many steps in the quiet enclosure where so much of
Wrychester mortality lay sleeping.

From over the topmost branches of the old yew trees a great shaft
of noontide sunlight fell full on a patch of the grey walls of the
high-roofed nave. At the foot of it, his back comfortably planted
against the angle of a projecting buttress, sat a man, evidently fast
asleep in the warmth of those powerful rays. His head leaned down and
forward over his chest, his hands were folded across his waist, his
whole attitude was that of a man who, having eaten and drunken in the
open air, has dropped off to sleep. That he had so dropped off while
in the very act of smoking was evident from the presence of a short,
well-blackened clay pipe which had fallen from his lips and lay in the
grass beside him. Near the pipe, spread on a coloured handkerchief, were
the remains of his dinner--Bryce's quick eye noticed fragments of bread,
cheese, onions. And close by stood one of those tin bottles in which
labouring men carry their drink; its cork, tied to the neck by a piece
of string, dangled against the side. A few yards away, a mass of fallen
rubbish and a shovel and wheelbarrow showed at what the sleeper had been
working when his dinner-hour and time for rest had arrived.

Something unusual, something curiously noticeable--yet he could not
exactly tell what--made Bryce go closer to the sleeping man. There was
a strange stillness about him--a rigidity which seemed to suggest
something more than sleep. And suddenly, with a stifled exclamation,
he bent forward and lifted one of the folded hands. It dropped like a
leaden weight when Bryce released it, and he pushed back the man's face
and looked searchingly into it. And in that instant he knew that for
the second time within a fortnight he had found a dead man in Wrychester
Paradise.

There was no doubt whatever that the man was dead. His hands and body
were warm enough--but there was not a flicker of breath; he was as dead
as any of the folk who lay six feet beneath the old gravestones around
him. And Bryce's practised touch and eye knew that he was only just
dead-