t?..."

Much remained puzzling: in chief the strange amiability of the master of
the Works toward the man he had once threatened to break for libel. They
had stood there chatting like friends, laughing.

But here Commissioner O'Neill could give little light. Last night his
friend had told him, indeed, with evidences of strange happiness, that
there was to be a new Heth Works at once. But he was mysteriously
reserved as to how this triumph for the O'Neill administration had been
brought to pass, saying repeatedly: "It's a sort of secret. I can't tell
you that, old fellow." But O'Neill remembered now one thing he had said,
with quite an excited air, which might be a sort of clue: "Don't you get
it, Sam?... It's all good. Everybody's good ... Why, I've known it all
the time."...

Now the two men had fallen silent. They were in the old waiting-room,
with the office door fast shut between. Royalty had slept in this room
once. It was decaying now, and bare as your hand but for the row of
kitchen chairs along the wall. The minister kept walking about; kept
humming beneath his breath. Once Sam O'Neill caught a line of that song:
_The victory of life is won._ A strange sentiment at this time
certainly; thoroughly clerical, though. It was a professional matter
with Dayne; only he, O'Neill, had been really close to V.V. And he was
continually burdened with a certain sense of personal responsibility for
it all....

"I'd like to have the doctor for that little girl in there," said Mr.
Dayne.

The Commissioner, who was getting really stout these days, cleared his
throat.

"How's she goin' to get on without him?"

"Ah, how?" said the clergyman, musing.

The stillness was like the silence before the dawn. Oppressive, too, was
the sense of emptiness. Two men in this chamber; one small watcher
beyond the door; otherwise emptiness, sensed through all the two hundred
rooms of the deserted pile. Life died from the world. People forgot.
Stillness, death, loneliness, and destitution. They had picked him to
the bone, and left him....

And then, as thoughts like these saddened the thoughts of the two men,
there was heard as it were the whir of wings in his old hotel. And the
crows came.

I say the crows came. They came in their own way; but so they had always
come. Came in the guise of an elderly tramp, vacant-eyed and
straggly-bearded, soiled, tentative, and reluctant. But what mattered
things like this: since in his wings, which