teous than
most men, for he read with as great fervour the adjurations against sins
into which he might fall as against those which seemed to him pointed
more especially at other sinners who might persecute him for his
innocence. He was only a suspicious man made narrower by isolation, and
the highest idea he had of what God required of him was a life of
innocence. There was better in him than this--much of impulse and action
that was positively good; but he did not conceive that it was of the
workings of good that seemed so natural that God took account.

Upon Saul also the psalm had adequate effect, for it sounded to him
pious, and that was all he desired.

The girl, however, could not listen to a word of it. She fidgeted, not
with movement of hands or feet, but with the restlessness of mind and
eyes. She gazed at the boards of the ceiling, at the boards of the
floor, at the log walls on which each shadow had a scalloped edge
because of the form of tree-trunks laid one above another. At length her
eyes rested on the lid of the coffin, and, with nervous strain, she made
them follow the grain of the wood up and down, up and down. There was an
irregular knothole in the lid, and on this her eyes fixed themselves,
and the focus of her sight seemed to eddy round and round its darkened
edge till, with an effort, she turned from it.

The boards used for making the coffin had been by no means perfect.
They were merely the best that could be chosen from among the bits of
sawn lumber at hand. There was a tiny hole in one side, at the foot, and
this larger one in the lid above the dead man's breast, where knots had
fallen out with rough handling, leaving oval apertures. The temptation
Sissy felt to let her eyes labour painfully over every marking in the
wood and round these two holes--playing a sort of sad mechanical game
therewith--and her efforts to resist the impulse, made up the only
memory she had of the time the reading occupied.

There was a printed prayer upon a piece of paper kept inside the lid of
the Bible, and when Bates had read the psalm, he read this also. He
knelt while he did so, and the others did the same. Then that was
finished.

"I'll move your bed into the kitchen, Sissy," said Bates.

He had made the same offer the night before, and she had accepted it
then, but now she replied that she would sooner sleep in that room than
near the stove. He was in no mood to contest such a point with her. Saul
went