He read one of the more trenchant of the Psalms, a long psalm that had much in it about enemies and slaughter.  It had a very strong meaning for him, for he put himself in the place of the writer.  The enemies mentioned were, in the first place, sins—­by which he denoted the more open forms of evil; and, in the second place, wicked men who might interfere with him; and under the head of wicked men he classed all whom he knew to be wicked, and most other men, whom he supposed to be so.  He was not a self-righteous man—­at least, not more self-righteous than most men, for he read with as great fervour the adjurations against sins into which he might fall as against those which seemed to him pointed more especially at other sinners who might persecute him for his innocence.  He was only a suspicious man made narrower by isolation, and the highest idea he had of what God required of him was a life of innocence.  There was better in him than this—­much of impulse and action that was positively good; but he did not conceive that it was of the workings of good that seemed so natural that God took account.

Upon Saul also the psalm had adequate effect, for it sounded to him pious, and that was all he desired.

The girl, however, could not listen to a word of it.  She fidgeted, not with movement of hands or feet, but with the restlessness of mind and eyes.  She gazed at the boards of the ceiling, at the boards of the floor, at the log walls on which each shadow had a scalloped edge because of the form of tree-trunks laid one above another.  At length her eyes rested on the lid of the coffin, and, with nervous strain, she made them follow the grain of the wood up and down, up and down.  There was an irregular knothole in the lid, and on this her eyes fixed themselves, and the focus of her sight seemed to eddy round and round its darkened edge till, with an effort, she turned from it.

The boards used for making the coffin had been by no means perfect.  They were merely the best that could be chosen from among the bits of sawn lumber at hand.  There was a tiny hole in one side, at the foot, and this larger one in the lid above the dead man’s breast, where knots had fallen out with rough handling, leaving oval apertures.  The temptation Sissy felt to let her eyes labour painfully over every marking in the wood and round these two holes—­playing a sort of sad mechanical game therewith—­and her efforts to resist the impulse, made up the only memory she had of the time the reading occupied.

There was a printed prayer upon a piece of paper kept inside the lid of the Bible, and when Bates had read the psalm, he read this also.  He knelt while he did so, and the others did the same.  Then that was finished.

“I’ll move your bed into the kitchen, Sissy,” said Bates.

He had made the same offer the night before, and she had accepted it then, but now she replied that she would sooner sleep in that room than near the stove.  He was in no mood to contest such a point with her.  Saul went out to his shed.  Bates shut the house door, and went up the ladder to his loft.  Both were soon in the sound slumber that is the lot of men who do much outdoor labour.