oad came up in the
evening air, broken occasionally by the shrill persistence of an exhaust
whistle or the clamour of a motor-horn, and above all other sounds the
long-drawn, occasional hoot from a ship anchored in the river highway.
There was noise, and to spare, outside, but within everything was still,
except for the chittering of a nest of bats in the eaves, and the
sudden, relaxing creak of bamboo chairs, that behave sometimes as though
ghosts sat restlessly in their arms.

The sunlight that fell into the garden and caught its green, turning it
into flaming emerald, climbed in at Mr. Heath's window, and lay across
his writing-table; it touched his shoulder and withdrew a little,
touched the lines on his forehead for a moment, touched the open book
before him, and fell away, followed by a shadow that grew deeper as it
passed. It faded out of the garden like a memory that cannot be held
back by human striving. The distances turned into shadowy blue, and from
blue to purple, until only a few flecks of golden light across the
pearl-silver told that it was gone eternally; that its hour was spent,
for good or ill, and that Mangadone had come one evening nearer to the
end of measureless Time; but the Rev. Francis Heath did not regard its
going. His face was sad with a terrible, tragic sadness that is the
sadness of life and not death, and yet it was of death and not of life
that he thought. A little book of George Herbert's poems lay open before
him and he had been reading it with a scholar's love of quaint
phraseology:

"I made a posy, while the days ran by;
Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.
But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they,
By noon, most cunningly did steal away,
And wither'd in my hand."

He read the lines over and over again, and gave a deep, heart-broken
sigh, bending his face between his hands, and bowing his shoulders as
though under a heavy weight. His gaunt frame was thin and spare, his
black alpaca coat hung on it like a sack, and his whole attitude spoke
of sorrow. He might have been the presentment of an unwilling ghost, who
stood with the Ferryman's farthing under his palm, waiting to be taken
across the cheerless, dark waters to a limbo of drifting souls. He took
his hands from before his face and clasped them over the book, looking
out of the window to the evening shadows, as if he tried to find peace
in the very act of conte