But Bryce was not to give even one look at Richard Jenkins’s tomb that day, nor the next, nor for many days—­death met him in another form before he had taken many steps in the quiet enclosure where so much of Wrychester mortality lay sleeping.

From over the topmost branches of the old yew trees a great shaft of noontide sunlight fell full on a patch of the grey walls of the high-roofed nave.  At the foot of it, his back comfortably planted against the angle of a projecting buttress, sat a man, evidently fast asleep in the warmth of those powerful rays.  His head leaned down and forward over his chest, his hands were folded across his waist, his whole attitude was that of a man who, having eaten and drunken in the open air, has dropped off to sleep.  That he had so dropped off while in the very act of smoking was evident from the presence of a short, well-blackened clay pipe which had fallen from his lips and lay in the grass beside him.  Near the pipe, spread on a coloured handkerchief, were the remains of his dinner—­Bryce’s quick eye noticed fragments of bread, cheese, onions.  And close by stood one of those tin bottles in which labouring men carry their drink; its cork, tied to the neck by a piece of string, dangled against the side.  A few yards away, a mass of fallen rubbish and a shovel and wheelbarrow showed at what the sleeper had been working when his dinner-hour and time for rest had arrived.

Something unusual, something curiously noticeable—­yet he could not exactly tell what—­made Bryce go closer to the sleeping man.  There was a strange stillness about him—­a rigidity which seemed to suggest something more than sleep.  And suddenly, with a stifled exclamation, he bent forward and lifted one of the folded hands.  It dropped like a leaden weight when Bryce released it, and he pushed back the man’s face and looked searchingly into it.  And in that instant he knew that for the second time within a fortnight he had found a dead man in Wrychester Paradise.

There was no doubt whatever that the man was dead.  His hands and body were warm enough—­but there was not a flicker of breath; he was as dead as any of the folk who lay six feet beneath the old gravestones around him.  And Bryce’s practised touch and eye knew that he was only just dead—­and that he had died in his sleep.  Everything there pointed unmistakably to what had happened.  The man had eaten his frugal dinner, washed it down from his tin bottle, lighted his pipe, leaned back in the warm sunlight, dropped asleep—­and died as quietly as a child taken from its play to its slumbers.

After one more careful look, Bryce turned and made through the trees to the path which crossed the old graveyard.  And there, going leisurely home to lunch, was Dick Bewery, who glanced at the young doctor inquisitively.

“Hullo!” he exclaimed with the freedom of youth towards something not much older.  “You there?  Anything on?”