“Hist!” The Vicar leaned out from the dark window above.  “Right:  it’s all ready.  We must stow it in the outhouse.  Trudgeon is down in the road below, waiting for me to finish.”

No more was said.  The Vicar withdrew:  after a minute I heard the planking creak:  then something white glimmered in the opening of the window—­something like a long bundle of linen, extruded inch by inch, then lowered on to the penthouse roof and let slide slowly down towards me.

“Got it?”

“Right.”  I steadied it a moment by its feet, then let it slide into my arms, and lowered it on to the gravelled path.  It was the body of John Emmet, in his winding-sheet.

“Carry it into the shed,” whispered the Vicar.  “I must show Trudgeon the coffin and hand him the keys.  When I’ve got rid of him I’ll come round.”

Somehow, the second time of handling it was far worse than the first.  The chill of the corpse seemed to strike through its linen wrappers.  But I lifted it inside, shut the door upon it, and stood wiping my forehead, while the Vicar closed the window cautiously, drew the blind, and pressed-to the clasp.

A minute later I heard him calling from the front, “Mr. Trudgeon—­Mr. Trudgeon”; and Trudgeon’s hob-nailed boots ascending the steps.  Silence followed for many minutes:  then a slant of candlelight faded off the fuchsia-bush round the corner, and the two men stumbled down the staircase—­stood muttering on the doorstep while a key grated in the lock—­stumbled down the steps and stood muttering in the sunken roadway.  At length they said “Good-night” and parted.  I listened while the sound of their footsteps died away:  Trudgeon’s down the hill towards the Porth, the Vicar’s up towards the church-town.

After this I had some painful minutes.  As they dragged by, an abominable curiosity took hold of me, an itch to open the door of the shed, strike a match, and have a look at the dead face I had never seen.  Then came into my mind a passage in the Republic which I had read a fortnight before—­how that one Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus under the north wall of the city, observed some corpses lying on the ground at the place of execution; and how he fought between his desire to look and his abhorrence until at length, the fascination mastering him, he forced his eyes open with his fingers and ran up exclaiming, “Look, wretches, look!  Feed your fill on the fair sight!” . . .  My seat was an inverted flower-pot, and clinging to it I began to count.  If the Vicar did not arrive before I reached five hundred, why, then . . .

“Hist!” He had fetched his compass round by the back of the garden, treading so softly that the signal sounded almost in my ear and fetched me off my flower-pot in a nervous quake.  He wore a heavy pea-jacket, and, as a smell of hot varnish announced, carried a dark lantern beneath it.  He had strapped this to his waist-belt to leave both hands free.