r a son of the Church in his last bitter hour? So it
was done while he lay unconscious.

For hours he lay still, and then the fevered blood, poisoned by
the bullet which had brought him down, made him delirious, gave him
hallucinations--open-eyed illusions. All the time Rosalie knelt at the
foot of the bed, her piteous tearless eyes for ever fixed on his face.

Towards evening, with an unnatural strength, he sat up in bed.

"See," he whispered, "that woman in the corner there. She has come
to take me, but I will not go." Fantasy after fantasy possessed
him-fantasy, strangely mixed with facts of his own past. Now it was
Kathleen, now Billy, now Jo Portugais, now John Brown, now Suzon
Charlemagne at the Cote Dorion, again Jo Portugais. In strange, touching
sentences he spoke to them, as though they were present before him. At
length he stopped abruptly, and gazed straight before him--over the head
of Rosalie into the distance.

"See," he said, pointing, "who is that? Who? I can't see his face--it
is covered. So tall-so white! He is opening his arms to me. He is
coming--closer--closer. Who is it?"

"It is Death, my son," said the priest in his ear, with a pitying
gentleness.

The Cure's voice seemed to calm the agitated sense, to bring it back to
the outer precincts of understanding. There was an awe-struck silence
as the dying man fumbled, fumbled, over his breast, found his eye-glass,
and, with a last feeble effort, raised it to his eye, shining now with
an unearthly fire. The old interrogation of the soul, the elemental
habit outlived all else in him. The idiosyncrasy of the mind
automatically expressed itself.

"I beg--your--pardon," he whispered to the imagined figure, and the
light died out of his eyes, "have I--ever--been--introduced--to you?"

"At the hour of your birth, my son," said the priest, as a sobbing cry
came from the foot of the bed.

But Charley did not hear. His ears were for ever closed to the voices of
life and time.

CHAPTER LX. THE HAND AT THE DOOR

The eve of the day of the memorable funeral two belated visitors to the
Passion Play arrived in the village, unknowing that it had ended, and of
the tragedy which had set a whole valley mourning; unconscious that they
shared in the bitter fortunes of the tailor-man, of whom men and women
spoke with tears. Affected by the gloom of the place, the two visitors
at once prepared for their return journey, but the manner of the
tailorman's d