Deadham parish went home to its tea that evening damp, not to say dripping, but well pleased with the figure it had cut in the public eye.  For it had contributed its quota to contemporary history; and what parish can, after all, do more!  Reporters pervaded it armed with note-books and pencils.  They put questions, politely requested a naming of names.  The information furnished in answer would reach the unassailable authority of print, giving Deadham opportunity to read the complimentary truth about itself.  Still better, giving others opportunity to read the complimentary truth about Deadham.  Hence trade and traffic of sorts, with much incidental replenishing of purses.  Great are the uses of a dead prophet to the keepers of his tomb!  Not within the memory of the oldest inhabitant had any funeral been so largely or honourably attended.  Truly it spelled excellent advertisement—­and this although two persons, calculated mightily to have heightened interest and brought up dramatic and emotional values, were absent from the scene.

For Lesbia Faircloth, giving her barman and two women servants a holiday, closed the inn at noon.  Alone within the empty house, she locked the outer doors.  Drew the blinds, reducing the interior to uniform, shadow-peopled obscurity, with the exception of her own bed-chamber.  There she left one small square window—­set deep in the stone work of the wall—­open and uncurtained.

It faced the causeway and perspective of lane skirting the warren and leading to the high road and village.  Looking out thence, in winter when the trees were bare, she could see Deadham church, crowning its monticule, part of the sloping graveyard and, below these in the middle distance, the roofs and gables of the village street.

To-day the view was obliterated.  For here, at the river level, mist and drizzle took the form of fog.  Opaque, chill and dank, it drifted in continuous, just perceptible, undulations past and in at the open casement.  Soon the air of the room grew thick and whitish, the dark oak furniture and the floor boards furred with moisture.  Yet, her methodical closure of the house complete, Lesbia Faircloth elected to sit in full inward sweep of it, drawing a straight-backed chair, mounted on roughly carpentered rockers, close to the window.

A handsome woman still, though in her late fifties, erect and of commanding presence, her figure well-proportioned if somewhat massive.  Her dark hair showed no grey.  Her rather brown skin was clear, smooth and soft in texture.  Her eyes clear, too, watchful and reticent; on occasion—­such as the driving of a business bargain say, or of a drunken client—­hard as flint.  Her mouth, a wholesome red, inclined to fullness; but had been governed to straightness of line—­will dominant, not only in her every movement, but in repose as she now sat, the chair rockers at a backward tilt, her capable and well-shaped hands folded on her black apron in the hollow of her lap.