What would go on in the next room?  She was anxious now to know more about it, because she had caught so strange a look on Father Molyneux’s face.  If he had only known this man before she could have understood it.  But how could there be this passion of affection, this intensity of feeling, for a total stranger, a rough brutal-looking fellow who was no longer in pain, who would probably die easily enough, and probably be no great loss to those he left?  She had seen a strange intensity of reverence in the way the young man had touched the wreck upon the bed.  She had known thrills of curious joy herself when relieving physical agony; was it something like that which filled the whole personality and bearing of the priest?

She began to feel that she could not go away; she wanted to see this thing out.  It was something entirely new to her.

Low voices murmured in the next room; she hesitated now to pass through, she might be intruding at too sacred a moment.  She believed that the priest was hearing the dying man’s confession.  She had a half contemptuous dislike of this feeling of mystery and privacy.  She felt she had been foolish not to go away at once.  But she did not move for nearly half an hour, and then the door opened, and the man’s wife came in and started back.

“I’m sure I thought you had gone, miss.”  Her manner was much more cordial than it had been before.  She was tearful and excited.  “I want to raise him a bit higher, and there’s a cloak here.  He is going off fast now, but he was quite himself when I left him with the father to make his confession; he looked his old self and the good man he was for many a year—­and God Almighty knows he has suffered enough these last years to change him, poor soul.”

Molly went back with her to the sick bed and helped her to raise the dying man.  The dawn came in feebly now, and made the guttering candle dimmer.  Death was all that was written on the grey face, and the body laboured for breath.  The flicker of light in the mind, that had been roused, perhaps, by those rites which had passed in her absence, had faded; there was not the faintest sign of intelligence in the eyes now; the hands were cold and would never be warm again.  The sandy cat had crept away into the other room; and outside the great town was alive again, the vast crowds were astir, each of whom was just one day nearer to death.  There was nothing but horror, stale, common horror, in it all for Molly.  But, kneeling as upright as a marble figure, and his whole face full of a joy that seemed quite human, quite natural, Father Molyneux was reading prayers, and there was a curious note of triumph in the clear tones.  At first she did not heed the words; then they thrust themselves upon her, and her eyes fastened on the dying, meaningless face, the very prey of death, in a kind of stupefaction at the words spoken to him.