ept very steady, and had a name for good nature."

Next day the man was in his garden at the same hour, and repeated the
performance. Throughout the following night I was kept awake by a
series of monotonous groans that reached me through the partition,
and the murmur of voices speaking at intervals. It was horrible to
lie within a few inches of the sick woman's head, to listen to her
agony and be unable to help, unable even to see. Towards six in the
morning, in bright daylight, I dropped off to sleep at last.

Two hours later the sound of voices came in at the open window and
awoke me. I looked out into my neighbour's garden. He was standing,
half-way up the path, in the sunshine, and engaged in a suppressed
but furious altercation with a thin woman, somewhat above middle
height. Both wore thick green veils over their faces and thick
gloves on their hands. The woman carried a rusty tea-tray.

The man stood against her, motioning her back towards the house.
I caught a sentence--"It'll be the death of her;" and the woman
glanced back over her shoulder towards the window of the sick-room.
She seemed about to reply, but shrugged her shoulders instead and
went back into the house, carrying her tray. The man turned on his
heel, walked hurriedly up the garden, and scrambled over its hedge
into the wood. His veil and thick gloves were explained a couple of
hours later, when I looked into the garden again and saw him hiving a
swarm of bees that he had captured, the first of the season.

That same afternoon, about four o'clock, I observed that every window
in the next house stood wide open. My landlady was out in the
garden, "picking in" her week's washing from the thorn hedge where it
had been suspended to dry; and I called her attention to this new
freak of our neighbours.

"Ah, then, the poor soul must be nigh to her end," said she.
"That's done to give her an easy death."

The woman died at half-past seven. And next morning her husband hung
a scrap of black crape to each of the bee-hives.

She was buried on Sunday afternoon. From behind the drawn blinds of
my sitting-room window I saw the funeral leave the house and move
down the front garden to the high-road--the heads of the mourners,
each with a white handkerchief pressed to its nose, appearing above
the wall like the top of a procession in some Assyrian sculpture.
The husband wore a ridiculously tall hat, and a hat-band with long
tails. The whole af