at me?"

The priest at the words crossed himself and turned to go, with a tinge
of red in his sallow cheeks. He was faithful to his duties and had come
to console a death bed, though he was well aware that his consolations
would be spurned.

As he left there came again the eerie laughter from the bed. "Ugh, I am
weary of that incomparable holiness. He hovers about to give me the St.
John's Cup, and would fain speed my passing. But I do not die yet, good
father. There's life still in the old wolf."

The monk in a bland voice spoke some Latin to the effect that mortal
times and seasons were ordained of God. The other stretched out a skinny
hand from the fur coverings and rang a silver bell. When Anton appeared
she gave the order "Bring supper for the reverend father," at which the
Cluniac's face mellowed into complacence.

It was a Friday evening in a hard February. Out-of-doors the snow lay
deep in the streets of Bruges, and every canal was frozen solid so that
carts rumbled along them as on a street. A wind had risen which
drifted the powdery snow and blew icy draughts through every chink.
The small-paned windows of the great upper-room were filled with oiled
vellum, but they did not keep out the weather, and currents of cold
air passed through them to the doorway, making the smoke of the four
charcoal braziers eddy and swirl. The place was warm, yet shot with
bitter gusts, and the smell of burning herbs gave it the heaviness of a
chapel at high mass. Hanging silver lamps, which blazed blue and smoky,
lit it in patches, sufficient to show the cleanness of the rush-strewn
floor, the glory of the hangings of cloth-of-gold and damask, and the
burnished sheen of the metal-work. There was no costlier chamber in that
rich city.

It was a strange staging for death, for the woman on the high bed was
dying. Slowly, fighting every inch of the way with a grim tenacity, but
indubitably dying. Her vital ardour had sunk below the mark from which
it could rise again, and was now ebbing as water runs from a little
crack in a pitcher. The best leeches in all Flanders and Artois had
come to doctor her. They had prescribed the horrid potions of the age:
tinctures of earth-worms; confections of spiders and wood-lice and
viper's flesh; broth of human skulls, oil, wine, ants' eggs, and crabs'
claws; the bufo preparatus, which was a live toad roasted in a pot and
ground to a powder; and innumerable plaisters and electuaries. She had
be