he who sat over against him, a
soldier as it seemed, black-bearded, with wild grey eyes that his great
brows hung over far; he, while the others sat still, awed by some vague
sense of spirits being very near them; this man, Giles, cried out--"Never?
old Hugh, it is not so.--Speak! I cannot tell you how it happened, but I
know it was not so, not so:--speak quick, Hugh! tell us all, all!"

"Wait a little, my son, wait," said Hugh; "the people indeed said they
never came back again at all, but I, but I--Ah! the time is long past
over." So he was silent, and sank his head on his breast, though his old
thin lips moved, as if he talked softly to himself, and the light of past
days flickered in his eyes.

Meanwhile Giles sat with his hands clasped finger over finger, tightly,
"till the knuckles whitened;" his lips were pressed firmly together; his
breast heaved as though it would burst, as though it must be rid of its
secret. Suddenly he sprang up, and in a voice that was a solemn chant,
began: "In full daylight, long ago, on a slumberously-wrathful,
thunderous afternoon of summer;"--then across his chant ran the old man's
shrill voice: "On an October day, packed close with heavy-lying mist,
which was more than mere autumn-mist:"--the solemn stately chanting
dropped, the shrill voice went on; Giles sank down again, and Hugh
standing there, swaying to and fro to the measured ringing of his own
shrill voice, his long beard moving with him, said:--

"On such a day, warm, and stifling so that one could scarcely breathe
even down by the sea-shore, I went from bed to bed in the hospital of the
pest-laden city with my soothing draughts and medicines. And there went
with me a holy woman, her face pale with much watching; yet I think even
without those same desolate lonely watchings her face would still have
been pale. She was not beautiful, her face being somewhat
peevish-looking; apt, she seemed, to be made angry by trifles, and, even
on her errand of mercy, she spoke roughly to those she tended:--no, she
was not beautiful, yet I could not help gazing at her, for her eyes were
very beautiful and looked out from her ugly face as a fair maiden might
look from a grim prison between the window-bars of it.

"So, going through that hospital, I came to a bed at last, whereon lay
one who had not been struck down by fever or plague, but had been smitten
through the body with a sword by certain robbers, so that he had narrowly
escaped