come up to the house and dance."

Kennedy had gone around the countryside for weeks, drunk every night,
making threats against the old farmer. And then a wily sergeant of the
Connaught Rangers had trapped him and taken him off to Aldershot.

Now he was home on furlough, and something had happened to her, and he
was coming up to make good his threat.

What had happened to her? Michael James didn't understand. He had given
her everything he could. She had taken it all with a demure thanks, but
he had never had anything of her but apathy. She had gone around the
house apathetically, growing a little thinner every day, and then a few
days ago she had lain down, and last night she had died, apathetically.

And young Kennedy was coming up for an accounting to-night. "Well,"
thought Michael James, "let him come!"

Silence suddenly fell over the company in the kitchen. Then a loud
scraping as they stood up, and a harsher grating as chairs were pushed
back. The door of the bedroom opened and the red flare from the fire and
lamps of the kitchen blended into the sickly yellow candle-light of the
bedroom.

The parish priest walked in. His closely cropped white hair, strong,
ruddy face, and erect back gave him more the appearance of a soldier
than a clergyman. He looked at the bed a moment, and then at Michael
James.

"Oh, you mustn't take it like that, man," he said. "You mustn't take
it like that. You must bear up." He was the only one who spoke in his
natural voice.

He turned to a lumbering farmer's wife who had followed him in, and
asked about the hour of the funeral. She answered in a hoarse whisper,
dropping a courtesy.

"You ought to go out and take a walk," he told Michael James. "You
oughtn't to stay in here all the time." And he left the room.

Michael James paid no attention. His mind was wandering to strange
fantasies he could not keep out of his head. Pictures crept in and
out of his brain, joined as by some thin filament. He thought somehow
of her soul, and then wondered what a soul was like. And then he
thought of a dove, and then of a bat fluttering through the dark,
and then of a bird lost at twilight. He thought of it as some lonely
flying thing with a long journey before it and no place to rest. He
could imagine it uttering the vibrant, plaintive cry of a peewit. And
then it struck him with a great sense of pity that the night was cold.

In the kitchen they were having tea. The rattle of the crockery