Then, little by little, he began, in that living stillness, to understand rather better what it was that he was witnessing....  It was not that there was anything physical in the room, beyond the things of which his senses told him; there was but the dingy furniture, the white bed, august now with a strange dignity as of a white altar, and the four persons beside himself—­five now, for Jimmie was beside him.  But that the physical was not the plane in which these five persons were now chiefly conscious was the most evident thing of all....  There was about them, not a Presence, not an air, not a sweetness or a sound, and yet it is by such negatives only that the thing can be expressed.

* * * * *

And so they kneeled and waited.

* * * * *

“Why, Jack—­”

It shook the waiting air like the sound of a bell, yet it was only whispered.  The man nearest him on the other side shook with a single spasmodic movement and laid his fingers gently on the bandaged hands.  And then for a long while there was no further movement or sound.

“Rosary!” said Frank suddenly, still in a whisper....  “Beads....”

Jack moved swiftly on his knees, took from the table a string of beads from where they had been laid the night before, and put them into the still fingers.  Then he laid his own hands over them again.

* * * * *

Again there was a long pause.

Outside in the street a footstep came up from the direction of Mortimer Road, waxed loud and clear on the pavement, and died again down towards the street leading to the marshes.  And, but for this, there was no further sound for a while.  Then a cock crew, thin and shrill, somewhere far away; a dray rumbled past the end of the street and was silent.

But the silence in the room was of a different quality; or, rather, the world seemed silent because this room was so, and not the other way.  It was here that the center lay, where a battered man was dying, and from this center radiated out the Great Peace.

It was no waste then, after all!—­this life of strange unreason ending in this very climax of uselessness, exactly when ordinary usefulness was about to begin.  Could that be waste that ended so?

“Priest,” whispered the voice from the bed.

Then Dick leaned forward.

“He has been,” he said distinctly and slowly.  “He was here at two o’clock.  He did—­what he came for.  And he’s coming again directly.”

The eyes closed in sign of assent and opened again.

He seemed to be looking, as in a kind of meditation, at nothing in particular.  It was as a man who waits at his ease for some pleasant little event that will unroll by and by.  He was in no ecstasy, and, it seemed, in no pain and in no fierce expectation; he was simply at his ease and waiting.  He was content, whatever those others might be.