them, and,
unnoticed by either, the entire aspect of things has changed. Under
the overcast sky it is in darkness they are playing, by guess and touch
chiefly; and suddenly an icy blast of wind has lifted the roof from the
old chapel, the trees are moaning in wild circular motion, and their
devil's penny-piece, when Apollyon throws it for the last time, is
itself but a twirling leaf in the wind, till it sinks edgewise, sawing
through the boy's face, uplifted in the dark to trace it, crushing in
the tender skull upon the brain.

His shout of laughter is turned in an instant to a cry of pain, of
reproach; and in that which echoed it--an immense cry, as from the very
heart of ancient tragedy, over the Picard wolds--it was as if that
half-extinguished deity, its proper immensity, its old greatness and
power, were restored for a moment. The villagers in their beds
wondered. It was like the sound of some natural catastrophe.

The storm which followed was still in possession, still moving
tearfully among the poplar groves, though it had spent its heat and
thunder. The last drops of the blood of Hyacinth still trickled
through the thick masses of dark hair, where the tonsure had been. An
abundant rain, mingling with the copious purple stream, had coloured
the grass all around where the corpse lay, stealing afar in tiny
channels.

[169] So it was, when Apollyon, reduced in the morning light to his
smaller self, came with the other people of the Grange to gaze, to
enquire, and found the Prior already there, speechless. Clearly this
was no lightning stroke; and Apollyon straightway conceives certain
very human fears that, coming upon those antecedent suspicions of
himself, the boy's death may be thought the result of intention on his
part. He proposes to bury the body at once, with no delay for
religious rites, in that still uncovered grave, the bearers having fled
from it in the tempest.

And next day, fulfilling his annual custom, he went his way northward,
without a word of farewell to Prior Saint-Jean, whom he leaves in fact
under suspicion of murder. From the profound slumber which had
followed the excitements of yesterday, the Prior awoke amid the sound
of voices, the voices of the peasants singing no Christian song,
certainly, but a song which Apollyon himself had taught them, to
dismiss him on his journey. For, strange or not as it might be, they
loved him, perhaps in spite of themselves; would certainly prot