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“It’s a mere little maid!” The bishop turned towards him, attentive but mystified. “A green child,” Dr. Brinley went on. “Yet here’s me still, and you !”
    The bishop still looked mystified; and the doctor was mildly shocked to find how little his own pathetic words moved even himself. So he tried again—and at least his old voice now quavered dramatically enough: “A wee maid scarce six years of age, they said. Dead! Tell me the meaning of it, you man of God!”
    Then he hiccuped, burst altogether into tears and upset his glass. They all turned kindly faces on him.
    â€œCome on, Doc,” he heard the High Steward saying: “Give us ‘Clementine.’”
8
    Midnight, back now at Newton Llantony ...
    As the clouds broke and the bright moon at last came out, the single point of light to which distance diminished the lamps of all roystering Flemton paled.
    In the big Newton drawing-room the shutters did not quite reach to the semi-circular tops of the windows, and through these high openings the moon sent bars of light into the black gloom within. It shone on the shapeless holland bag which enclosed the great central chandelier: threw criss-cross shadows on the dust-sheets covering the furniture and covering the old mirrors on the walls. It shone on the new gilt frame of the life-size khaki portrait above the fireplace: glinted on the word “Ypres,” and the date and the name, inscribed on brass.
    It glinted on the painted highlights in the dead young man’s eyes.
    It shone on the small shapeless dark shape in the middle of the big sofa opposite, the outstretched arms. Glinted on the little slits of eyeball between the half-open lids.
    Augustine, in his white attic bedroom under the roof, woke with the moon staring straight in his eyes.
    Round him the house was silent. In all its hundred rooms he knew there was no living being that night but him.
    Downstairs a door banged without reason. His scalp pricked momentarily, and the yawn he was beginning went off at half-cock.
    He who so loved to be alone felt now a sudden unmitigated longing for living human company.
    His sister Mary ...
    Her child Polly, that little niece he loved ...
    For a moment, being but half-awake, he thought Polly had crept into his bed and was sleeping there, tiny and warm and humid, her feet planted firmly against his chest. But when he stirred she vanished: the bed was empty and cold.
    Where would they be now, Polly and her mother? He had an idea they were away from home, there had been something in Mary’s last letter ...
    Instinctively Augustine knew that this eremitical phase of his life was now over, had finally served its turn: indeed he was tempted to get out his Bentley that very minute and drive to London, drive right through the night as if he meant never to come back to Newton. “ London! ” He recalled it now: that was where Mary was taking Polly for a day or two, she had written; and he could be with them there by breakfast.
    But he decided after all to wait till morning. He must at least be still here when the ambulance arrived, he remembered ...
    Meanwhile he lay where he was, neither awake nor asleep, in his familiar boyhood bed, cold and sweating.
    Something in the room creaked.
9
    Augustine waited till the morning before starting; but the belt of rainy weather traveled eastward ahead of him across Carmarthen and Brecon. Clearing even the eastern counties of Wales about midnight, long before dawn it had arrive in London (where Polly was). There it poured heavily and steadily all day. All that wet Tuesday it felt in London as if thunder was about, though none was heard.
    On the opposite side of Eaton Square from Polly’s there was a certain tall house which Polly always passed slowly and with evident respect. It belonged to Lady Sylvia Davenant, but Polly called it “Janey’s house.” Seen from a window of the upstairs drawing-room of this