Much remained puzzling:  in chief the strange amiability of the master of the Works toward the man he had once threatened to break for libel.  They had stood there chatting like friends, laughing.

But here Commissioner O’Neill could give little light.  Last night his friend had told him, indeed, with evidences of strange happiness, that there was to be a new Heth Works at once.  But he was mysteriously reserved as to how this triumph for the O’Neill administration had been brought to pass, saying repeatedly:  “It’s a sort of secret.  I can’t tell you that, old fellow.”  But O’Neill remembered now one thing he had said, with quite an excited air, which might be a sort of clue:  “Don’t you get it, Sam?...  It’s all good.  Everybody’s good ...  Why, I’ve known it all the time."...

Now the two men had fallen silent.  They were in the old waiting-room, with the office door fast shut between.  Royalty had slept in this room once.  It was decaying now, and bare as your hand but for the row of kitchen chairs along the wall.  The minister kept walking about; kept humming beneath his breath.  Once Sam O’Neill caught a line of that song:  The victory of life is won. A strange sentiment at this time certainly; thoroughly clerical, though.  It was a professional matter with Dayne; only he, O’Neill, had been really close to V.V.  And he was continually burdened with a certain sense of personal responsibility for it all....

“I’d like to have the doctor for that little girl in there,” said Mr. Dayne.

The Commissioner, who was getting really stout these days, cleared his throat.

“How’s she goin’ to get on without him?”

“Ah, how?” said the clergyman, musing.

The stillness was like the silence before the dawn.  Oppressive, too, was the sense of emptiness.  Two men in this chamber; one small watcher beyond the door; otherwise emptiness, sensed through all the two hundred rooms of the deserted pile.  Life died from the world.  People forgot.  Stillness, death, loneliness, and destitution.  They had picked him to the bone, and left him....

And then, as thoughts like these saddened the thoughts of the two men, there was heard as it were the whir of wings in his old hotel.  And the crows came.

I say the crows came.  They came in their own way; but so they had always come.  Came in the guise of an elderly tramp, vacant-eyed and straggly-bearded, soiled, tentative, and reluctant.  But what mattered things like this:  since in his wings, which were only hairy arms that needed soap, he brought the raiment?  Such a pile of them, too, such royal abundance.  A fine black cutaway coat, a handsome pair of “extra” trousers, shirts, and shoes, and, peeping beneath all, glimpses of a pretty blue suit quite obviously as good as new.

There stood the wonder, silent and uncouth, in the doorway.  Do you doubt that Sam O’Neill and Mr. Dayne knew, the moment their eyes saw, that here were the crows come?  How they gazed and gazed, and how poor Mister Garland, ever retiring of habit, squirmed and shifted over an uneasy heart....