d stopped. The men were lifting the coffin out, shouldering
it, carrying it along. He saw Gwenda Cartaret swerve out of their way.
Presently he heard her running down the road.

Then he remembered what he had been sent for.

He turned his attention to Mrs. Gale. She was a square-set,
blunt-featured woman of forty-five or so, who had once been comely
like her daughter Essy. Now her soft chin had sagged; in her cheeks
the stagnant blood crawled through a network of little veins, and
the gloss had gone from her dark hair. Her brown eyes showed a dull
defiance and deprecation of the human destiny.

"Where is he?" he said.

"Oop there, in t' room wi' 's feyther."

"Been drinking again, or what?"

"Naw, Dr. Rawcliffe, 'e 'assn't. I suddn' a sent for yo all this road
for nowt."

She drew him into the house place, and whispered.

"I'm feared 'e'll goa queer in 'is 'head, like. 'E's sot there by t'
body sence yesterda noon. 'E's not takken off 'is breeches for tree
daas. 'E caaun't sleap; 'e wunna eat and 'e wunna drink. There's work
to be doon and 'e wunna lay haand to it. Wull yo goa oop t' 'im, Dr.
Rawcliffe?"

Rowcliffe went up.

XIII

In the low lighted room the thing that Gwenda Cartaret had seen lay
stretched in the middle of the great bed, covered with a sheet. The
bed, with its white mound, was so much too big for the four walls that
held it, the white plaster of the ceiling bulging above it stooped so
low, that the body of John Greatorex lay as if already closed up in
its tomb.

Jim Greatorex, his son, sat on a wooden chair at the head of the
bed. His young, handsome face was loose and flushed as if he had been
drinking. His eyes--the queer, blue, wide-open eyes that had hitherto
looked out at you from their lodging in that ruddy, sensuous face,
incongruously spiritual, high and above your head, like the eyes of a
dreamer and a mystic--Jim's eyes were sunken now and darkened in their
red and swollen lids. They stared at the rug laid down beside the bed,
while Jim's mind set itself to count, stupidly and obstinately, the
snippets of gray and scarlet cloth that made the pattern on the black.
Every now and then he would recognise a snippet as belonging to some
suit his father had worn years ago, and then Jim's brain would receive
a shock and would stagger and have to begin its counting all over
again.

The door opened to let Rowcliffe in. And at the sound of the door,
as if a spring had been sud