denly released in his spine, Jim Greatorex
shot up and started to his feet.

"Well, Greatorex----"

"Good evening, Dr. Rawcliffe." He came forward awkwardly, hanging his
head as if detected in an act of shame.

There was a silence while the two men turned their backs upon the
bed, determined to ignore what was on it. They stood together by the
window, pretending to stare at things out there in the night; and so
they became aware of the men carrying the coffin.

They could no longer ignore it.

"Wull yo look at 'Im, doctor?"

"Better not----." Rowcliffe would have laid his hand on the young
man's arm, muttering a refusal, but Greatorex had moved to the bed and
drawn back the sheet.

What Gwenda Cartaret had seen was revealed.

The dead man's face, upturned with a slight tilt to the ceiling that
bulged so brutally above it, the stiff dark beard accentuating the
tilt, the eyes, also upturned, white under their unclosing lids, the
nostrils, the half-open mouth preserved their wonder and their terror
before a thing so incredible--that the walls and roof of a man's room
should close round him and suffocate him. On this horrified face there
were the marks of dissolution, and, at the corners of the grim beard
and moustache, a stain.

It left nothing to be said. It was the face of the man who had drunk
hard and had told his son that he had never been the worse for drink.

Jim Greatorex stood and looked at it as if he knew what Rowcliffe was
thinking of it and defied him to think.

Rowcliffe drew up the sheet and covered it. "You'd better come out of
this. It isn't good for you," he said.

"I knaw what's good for me, Dr. Rawcliffe."

Jim stuck his hands in his breeches and gazed stubbornly at the
sheeted mound.

"Come," Rowcliffe said, "don't give way like this. Buck up and be a
man."

"A ma-an? You wait till yor turn cooms, doctor."

"My turn came ten years ago, and it may come again."

"And yo'll knaw then what good it doos ta-alkin'." He paused,
listening. "They've coom," he said.

There was a sound of scuffling on the stone floor below and on the
stairs. Mrs. Gale's voice was heard out on the landing, calling to the
men.

"Easy with un--easy. Mind t' lamp. Eh--yo'll never get un oop that
road. Yo mun coax un round corner."

A swinging thud on the stone wall. Then more and more desperate
scuffling with muttering. Then silence.

Mrs. Gale put her head in at the door.

"Jimmy, yo mun coom and gie a