“I’ve been having a quiet half-hour here,” he said.  “It does me a sight of good to sit in the abbey.”

“You should go into the cloisters,” she said, kindly.  “I have been sitting there with my friend.  He will be interested to hear that you love this beautiful abbey.”

“I should like to see him again,” said the workman.  “He had a kind way about him, and that pipe he gave me is an uncommon good one.  Still, I am sorry I smashed the little clay pipe.  I’d grown used to it.  I’d smoked it ever since my little girl died and left me alone in the world.  I used to bring my little girl here, and now I come alone.  But it isn’t the same thing.”

“No, it could not be the same thing,” said Helen, gently.  “But you find some comfort here?”

“Some little comfort,” he answered.  “One can’t expect much.”

They went together into the cloisters, and as they came near the recess where the old man rested Helen said: 

“Why, he has fallen asleep!  He must have been very tired.  And he has dropped his hat and stick.  Thank you.  If you will put them down there, I will watch by his side until he wakes up.  I don’t suppose he will sleep for long.”

The workman stooped down to pick up the hat and stick, and glanced at the sleeper.  Something in the sleeper’s countenance arrested his attention.  He turned to the girl, and saw that she was watching him.

“What is it?” she asked anxiously.  “What is the matter with you?”

He tried to speak, but his voice failed him, and all he could do was to point with trembling hand to the old man.

Helen looked, and a loud cry broke from her lips.  The old man was dead.

THE OMNIBUS, By Quiller-Couch

All that follows was spoken in a small tavern, a stone’s throw from Cheapside, the day before I left London.  It was spoken in a dull voice, across a greasy table-cloth, and amid an atmosphere so thick with the reek of cooking that one longed to change it for the torrid street again, to broil in an ampler furnace.  Old Tom Pickford spoke it, who has been a clerk for fifty-two years in Tweedy’s East India warehouse, and in all that time has never been out of London, but when he takes a holiday spends it in hanging about Tweedy’s, and observing that unlovely place of business from the outside.  The dust, if not the iron, of Tweedy’s has entered into his soul; and Tweedy’s young men know him as “the Mastodon.”  He is a thin, bald septuagenarian, with sloping shoulders, and a habit of regarding the pavement when he walks, so that he seems to steer his way by instinct rather than sight.  In general he keeps silence while eating his chop; and on this occasion there was something unnatural in his utterance, a divorce of manner between the speaker and his words, such as one would expect in a sibyl disclaiming under stress of the god.  I fancied it had something to do with a black necktie that he wore instead of the blue bird’s-eye cravat familiar to Tweedy’s, and with his extraordinary conduct in refusing to-day the chop that the waiter brought, and limiting his lunch to cheese and lettuce.