been following instructions laid
down in a ritual.

The old man wished to heaven they would stay away. He had been sitting
in his chair for hours, thinking, until his head was in a whirl. He
wanted to concentrate his thoughts, but somehow he felt that the
mourners were preventing him.

The five candles at the head of the bed distracted him. He was glad when
the figure of one of the mourners shut off the glare for a few minutes.
He was also distracted by the five chairs standing around the room like
sentries on post and the little table by the window with its crucifix
and holy-water font. He wanted to keep thinking of "herself," as he
called her, lost in the immensity of the oaken bed. He had been looking
at the pinched face with its faint suspicion of blue since early that
morning. He was very much awed by the nun's hood that concealed the back
of the head, and the stiffly posed arms and the small hands in their
white-cotton gloves moved him to a deep pity.

Somebody touched him on the shoulder. "Michael James."

It was big Dan Murray, a gaunt red farmer, who had been best man at his
wedding.

"Michael James."

"What is it?"

"I hear young Kennedy's in the village."

"What of that?"

"I thought it was best for you to know."

Murray waited a moment, then he went out, on tiptoe, as everybody did,
his movements resembling the stilted gestures of a mechanical toy.

Down the drive Michael heard steps coming. Then a struggle and a shrill
giggle. Some young people were coming to the wake, and he knew a boy had
tried to kiss a girl in the dark. He felt a dull surge of resentment.

She was nineteen when he married her; he was sixty-three. Because he had
over two hundred acres of land and many head of milch and grazing cattle
and a huge house that rambled like a barrack, her father had given her
to him; and young Kennedy, who had been her father's steward for years,
and had been saving to buy a house for her, was thrown over like a bale
of mildewed hay.

Kennedy had made several violent scenes. Michael James remembered the
morning of the wedding. Kennedy waylaid the bridal-party coming out of
the church. He was drunk. "Mark me," he had said, very quietly for a
drunken man--"mark me. If anything ever happens to that girl at your
side, Michael James, I'll murder you. I'll murder you in cold blood. Do
you understand?"

Michael James could be forgiving that morning. "Run away and sober up,
lad," he had said, "and