Jim Greatorex, his son, sat on a wooden chair at the head of the bed.  His young, handsome face was loose and flushed as if he had been drinking.  His eyes—­the queer, blue, wide-open eyes that had hitherto looked out at you from their lodging in that ruddy, sensuous face, incongruously spiritual, high and above your head, like the eyes of a dreamer and a mystic—­Jim’s eyes were sunken now and darkened in their red and swollen lids.  They stared at the rug laid down beside the bed, while Jim’s mind set itself to count, stupidly and obstinately, the snippets of gray and scarlet cloth that made the pattern on the black.  Every now and then he would recognise a snippet as belonging to some suit his father had worn years ago, and then Jim’s brain would receive a shock and would stagger and have to begin its counting all over again.

The door opened to let Rowcliffe in.  And at the sound of the door, as if a spring had been suddenly released in his spine, Jim Greatorex shot up and started to his feet.

“Well, Greatorex——­”

“Good evening, Dr. Rawcliffe.”  He came forward awkwardly, hanging his head as if detected in an act of shame.

There was a silence while the two men turned their backs upon the bed, determined to ignore what was on it.  They stood together by the window, pretending to stare at things out there in the night; and so they became aware of the men carrying the coffin.

They could no longer ignore it.

“Wull yo look at ’Im, doctor?”

“Better not——.”  Rowcliffe would have laid his hand on the young man’s arm, muttering a refusal, but Greatorex had moved to the bed and drawn back the sheet.

What Gwenda Cartaret had seen was revealed.

The dead man’s face, upturned with a slight tilt to the ceiling that bulged so brutally above it, the stiff dark beard accentuating the tilt, the eyes, also upturned, white under their unclosing lids, the nostrils, the half-open mouth preserved their wonder and their terror before a thing so incredible—­that the walls and roof of a man’s room should close round him and suffocate him.  On this horrified face there were the marks of dissolution, and, at the corners of the grim beard and moustache, a stain.

It left nothing to be said.  It was the face of the man who had drunk hard and had told his son that he had never been the worse for drink.

Jim Greatorex stood and looked at it as if he knew what Rowcliffe was thinking of it and defied him to think.

Rowcliffe drew up the sheet and covered it.  “You’d better come out of this.  It isn’t good for you,” he said.

“I knaw what’s good for me, Dr. Rawcliffe.”

Jim stuck his hands in his breeches and gazed stubbornly at the sheeted mound.

“Come,” Rowcliffe said, “don’t give way like this.  Buck up and be a man.”

“A ma-an?  You wait till yor turn cooms, doctor.”

“My turn came ten years ago, and it may come again.”