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gaze.
    “A thoroughly mean man . . . that's what you are, William, a thoroughly mean and cruel man! That sad look in your eyes that you always say is sensitiveness is really cruelty! That's what it is. Just cold-blooded malicious cruelty . . • and sensual too, oh, wickedly, wickedly sensual!”
    With the absolute calm of a botanist observing a plant did the curiosity in the soul of this corpse listen to this whisper of memory.
    And again the voice of the proud lady out of her Swiss grave penetrated the Norfolk clay.
    “Elizabeth Devereux to William Crow! I was a fool ever to marry such a person as you, William. Mother always said it was marrying beneath me.”
    The mouth of the dead face fell open a little further and the terrible, unapproachable silence of decomposition deepened.
    “My Philip's son will be like his father,” the woman's voice reiterated. “He'll be all me! He'll be a true Philip Devereux. He'll have no touch of the Dane in him.”
    The confinement of the coffin-boards was nothing to William Crow. The raw clay, rattling noisily down from the sexton's spade, was less than nothing to him. To suffer from anything, lo enjoy anything—he had forgotten what those words meant. Enjoyment, suffering? What strange, morbid by-issues of human consciousness were these?
    But the voice of the woman began again; and that cold, disinterested curiosity stirred placidly to hear her words.
    “Yes! You may look at yourself in the looking-glass as long as you like, William. That sad, weary look under your eyebrows, over your eyelids, is nothing but selfish cruelty . . . such as kills flies and torments people without hitting them! My family has always taken what it wanted. But it never stooped to spiteful tormenting. My father used to say that when Norman families stop ruling England, England will get soft and wordy and mean . . . just like you, William. . . .”
    With impervious calm, as he listened to all this, did the soul oi that passive corpse wonder vaguely whether this Devereux despotism was, or was not, the true secret of dealing with earth-life below the sun. It wondered too, with the same complacent indifference, whether the humming of these confused memories was going to lapse into what they called “eternal rest” or going to prelude some new and surprising change. Whichever it was, it was equally interesting, now that pleasure and pain were both gone. Annihilation—how strange! A new conscious life—how strange! What indeed the soul of the Rector of Northwold experienced, at that moment of his burial, was more like the Homeric view of death than anything else—only with more indifference to love and fame! Everything human in him was, in fact, subsumed in that primeval urge which originally lost us Paradise. The Reverend William, cold and stiff, cared for nothing except to satisfy his curiosity.
    Meanwhile in the great Rectory drawing-room another and a far less disinterested curiosity was mounting up, mounting up to a positive suffering of totalisation, as Mr. Anthony Didlingtoa looking so much like a character of Sir Walter Scott that you expected him, after every resounding period from his parchment document,t0 take a vigorous pinch of snufl—read the late Canon's will.
    John and Mary had ensconced themselves on a small eighteenth-century sofa, that had the air of being the identical sofa that gave a title to Cowper's poem; and that stood back, behind the more pretentious pieces of furniture, near the furthest window.
    In the most important place in the room sat Tilly Crow, Philip's wife, a small, trim, dark, little woman with a high forehead, carefully parted hair, black, beady eyes, and under her chin a colossal wedgewood brooch. Opposite Mrs. Philip, on the further side of the hearth where a warm fire was burning, sat Elizabeth Crow in her mother's little green velvet arm-chair which the great black satin dress of the portly lady filled to overflowing. Her face was*weary and wistful rather than