ath brings, shutting a poor devil up like a child
kicking against the door in a dark cupboard; one might surely one
might--just quietly, you know, try to get out? wouldn't you?' he added.

'And, surely,' he found himself beginning gently to argue again,
'surely, what about, say, him?' He nodded towards the old and broken
grave that lay between them.

'What, Sabathier?' the other echoed, laying his hand upon the stone.

And a sheer enormous abyss of silence seemed to follow the unanswerable
question.

'He was a stranger; it says so. Good God!' said Lawford, 'how he must
have wanted to get home! He killed himself, poor wretch, think of the
fret and fever he must have been in--just before. Imagine it.'

'But it might, you know,' suggested the other with a smile--'might have
been sheer indifference.'

'"Nicholas Sabathier, Stranger to this parish"--no, no,' said Lawford,
his heart beating as if it would choke him, 'I don't fancy it was
indifference.'

It was almost too dark now to distinguish the stranger's features but
there seemed a faint suggestion of irony in his voice. 'And how do
you suppose your angry naughty child would set about it? It's narrow
quarters; how would he begin?'

Lawford sat quite still. 'You say--I hope I am not detaining you--you
say you have come here, sat here often, on this very seat; have you ever
had--have you ever fallen asleep here?'

'Why do you ask?' inquired the other curiously.

'I was only wondering,' said Lawford. He was cold and shivering. He felt
instinctively it was madness to sit on here in the thin gliding mist
that had gathered in swathes above the grass, milk-pale in the rising
moon. The stranger turned away from him.

'"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come must give us pause,"'
he said slowly, with a little satirical catch on the last word. 'What
did you dream?'

Lawford glanced helplessly about him. The moon cast lean grey beams
of light between the cypresses. But to his wide and wandering eyes it
seemed that a radiance other than hers haunted these mounds and leaning
stones. 'Have you ever noticed it?' he said, putting out his hand
towards his unknown companion; 'this stone is cracked from head to
foot?... But there'--he rose stiff and chilled--'I am afraid I have
bored you with my company. You came here for solitude, and I have been
trying to convince you that we are surrounded with witnesses. You will
forgive my intrusion?' There was a kind of old-fa