“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“There’s no occasion.  I can’t say I’m sorry, though she was one of the best women I ever knew.”

“Why are you not sorry, then?  Life’s a good thing in the main, you will allow.”

“Yes, when it’s endurable at all.  But to have a brute of a husband coming home at any hour of the night or morning, drunk upon the money she had earned by hard work, was enough to take more of the shine out of things than church-going on Sundays could put in again, regular as she was, poor woman!  I’m as glad as her brute of a husband, that she’s out of his way at last.”

“How do you know he’s glad of it?”

“He’s been drunk every night since she died.”

“Then he’s the worse for losing her?”

“He may well be.  Crying like a hypocrite, too, over his own work!”

“A fool he must be.  A hypocrite, perhaps not.  A hypocrite is a terrible name to give.  Perhaps her death will do him good.”

“He doesn’t deserve to be done any good to.  I would have made this coffin for him with a world of pleasure.”

“I never found that I deserved anything, not even a coffin.  The only claim that I could ever lay to anything was that I was very much in want of it.”

The old smile returned—­as much as to say, “That’s your little game in the church.”  But I resolved to try nothing more with him at present; and indeed was sorry that I had started the new question at all, partly because thus I had again given him occasion to feel that he knew better than I did, which was not good either for him or for me in our relation to each other.

“This has been a fine old room once,” I said, looking round the workshop.

“You can see it wasn’t a workshop always, sir.  Many a grand dinner-party has sat down in this room when it was in its glory.  Look at the chimney-piece there.”

“I have been looking at it,” I said, going nearer.

“It represents the four quarters of the world, you see.”

I saw strange figures of men and women, one on a kneeling camel, one on a crawling crocodile, and others differently mounted; with various besides of Nature’s bizarre productions creeping and flying in stone-carving over the huge fire-place, in which, in place of a fire, stood several new and therefore brilliantly red cart-wheels.  The sun shone through the upper part of a high window, of which many of the panes were broken, right in upon the cart-wheels, which, glowing thus in the chimney under the sombre chimney-piece, added to the grotesque look of the whole assemblage of contrasts.  The coffin and the carpenter stood in the twilight occasioned by the sharp division of light made by a lofty wing of the house that rose flanking the other window.  The room was still wainscotted in panels, which, I presume, for the sake of the more light required for handicraft, had been washed all over with white.  At the level of labour they were broken in many places.  Somehow or other, the whole reminded me of Albert Durer’s “Melencholia.”