now--straight on his back and his feet pointing to
the east, at least I hope so, for I could take no good bearings in the
dark; and the whole wonderful story comes to its wonderful end. So give
me your hand out of this hole, Father, and say your prayers over the
sinful body of this wicked fellow who dared to marry the maid he loved,
and to let out the souls of certain holy monks, or rather of their hired
rufflers, for monks don't fight, because they wished to separate those
whom God--I mean the devil--had joined together, and to add their
temporalities to the estate of Mother Church."

Then the old priest, who was shivering with cold, and understood little
of this dark talk, began to mumble his ritual, skipping those parts
of it which he could not remember. So another grain was planted in the
cornfields of death and immortality, though when and where it should
grow and what it should bear he neither knew nor cared, who wished to
escape from fears and fightings back to his accustomed cell.

It was done, and he and the bearers departed, beating their way against
the rough, raw wind, and leaving Thomas Bolle to fill in the grave,
which, so long as they were in sight, or rather hearing, he did with
much vigour. When they were gone, however, he descended into the hole
under pretence of trampling the loose soil, and there, to be out of the
wind, sat himself down upon the feet of the corpse and waited, full of
reflections.

"Sir Christopher dead," he muttered to himself. "I knew his grandfather
when I was a lad, and my grandfather told me that he knew his
grandfather's great-grandfather--say three hundred years of them--and
now I sit on the cold toes of the last of the lot, butchered like a mad
ox in his own yard by a Spanish priest and his hirelings, to win his
wife's goods. Oh! yes, it is wonderful, all very wonderful; and the Lady
Cicely dead, burnt like a common witch. And Emlyn dead--Emlyn, whom I
have hugged many a time in this very churchyard, before they whipped her
into marrying that fat old grieve and made a monk of me.

"Well, I had her first kiss, and, by the saints! how she cursed old
Stower all the way down yonder path. I stood behind that tree and heard
her. She said he would die soon, and he did, and his brat with him. She
said she would dance on his grave, and she did; I saw her do it in the
moonlight the night after he was buried; dressed in white she danced on
his grave! She always kept her promises, did