owned to come up out of their
world."

They sat silent again for three or four minutes. Then Sir Graham said:

"Uniacke, you have finished your tea?"

"Yes, Sir Graham."

"Has your day's work tired you very much?"

"No."

"Then I wish you would do me a favour. I want to see your skipper. Can I
get into the church?"

"Yes. He always leaves the door wide open while he rings the bells--so
that his mates can come in from the sea to him."

"Poor fellow! Poor fellow!"

He got up.

"I shall go across to the church now," he said.

"I'll take you there. Wrap yourself up. It's cold to-night."

"It is very cold."

The painter pulled a great cloak over his shoulders and a cap down over
his glittering and melancholy eyes, that had watched for many years all
the subtle changes of the colour and the movement of the sea. Uniacke
opened the Vicarage door and they stood in the wind. The night was not
dark, but one of those wan and light grey nights that seemed painted
with the very hues of wind and of cloud. It was like a fluid round about
them, and surely flowed hither and thither, now swaying quietly, now
spreading away, shredded out as water that is split by hard substances.
It was full of noise as is a whirlpool, in which melancholy cries
resound forever. Above this noise the notes of the two bells alternated
like the voices of stars in a stormy sky.

"Even living men at sea to-night would not hear those bells," said the
painter. "And the drowned--how can they hear?"

"Who knows?" said the clergyman. "Perhaps they are allowed to hear them
and to offer up prayers for their faithful comrade. I think faithfulness
is heaven in a human heart."

They moved across the churchyard, and all the graves of the drowned
flickered round their feet in the gusty greyness. They passed Jack
Pringle's grave, where the "Kindly Light" lay in the stone. When they
gained the church Sir Graham saw that the door was set wide open to the
night. He stood still.

"And so those dead mariners are to pass in here," he said, "under this
porch. Uniacke, cannot you imagine the scene if they came? Those dead
men, with their white, sea-washed faces, their dripping bodies, their
wild eyes that had looked on the depths of the sea, their hanging hands
round which the fishes had nibbled with their oval lips! The procession
of the drowned to their faithful captain. If I stood here long enough
alone my imagination would hear them, would hear their ghost