The night was clear and pleasant, but to a lonely man the far-shining brilliance of the Blaindon Arms appeared more pleasant still: and so he turned on his heel and swung in through the unaccustomed door.

"Why, bless me, Mr Gaffekin," said Nancy, "it's a long time since you've been in."

"It is, indeed, Nancy. How's life?"

"Oh, just as usual, Mr Gaffekin, thank you. Have you heard from Mr Price again?"

"Not a word," said John. "Not a single word since last summer."

"Now, that's odd, sir," said Peter Smith, "very odd."

"I tell you what," said Thomas Bodkin, the s.e.xton, with prodigious wisdom, "he's fallen in love."

"He wasn't much that sort, Mr Bodkin," said Nancy, with a little sigh.

It pleased her to imagine that her heart was broken.

"d.a.m.ned silly," said old Canthrop. "d.a.m.ned silly. Never tould his feyther."

"And the old man so cut up about it," said Peter Smith.

"Yes," said John. "Didn't get back to business for nearly a week."

"Ah, it's curious to think of him so far away," said Nancy. "Out there in Aljanda. That is, if he wasn't killed in the row."

"Ah, if...." said the s.e.xton ominously.

The _Daily Mail_ had contained one day a few months ago a small paragraph which had caused quite an excitement in the village of Blaindon, reporting "considerable fermentation in the little State of Alsander." But the succeeding numbers had no further information on the subject, being well stocked with letters answering the grave question "Is the stage immoral?" which the great paper had proposed to itself with typical earnestness and audacity. The inhabitants of Blaindon, however, were not deterred by the meagreness of the data from an almost daily discussion as to whether their fellow townsman had perished.

"You cheer up, Nancy," said John Oggs, who was the s.e.xton's opponent in the controversy. "Price is all right, and he'll turn up again one of these days, all boiled yellow by the sun."

"What a strange thing Life is," said Nancy.

"A strange thing indeed," said old Canthrop. "A strange thing."

"The sun makes one red, not yellow," said the s.e.xton. "But it's small colour he's showing now, poor boy, I can tell you. In them furrin parts knives aint reserved for cheese. And he'd have written for sure."

"Ah, s.e.xton," said John to escape the perpetual topic, "I can see you're a man of ideas."

"Well, Mr Gaffekin, I may not have been to Oxford, as I say, but I does think. As I said to Parson once before a burial. 'You and I, sir,' I said, 'are thinking men.' It goes with the business."

"It must be dreadful work," said John Oggs. "Digging holes for dead men.

Well, we must all go under."

"Ay, indeed," said old Canthrop.

"Don't speak from the bottom of your throat like that," said Peter Smith. "It gives me the horrors, with all this talk about death and all."

"Death should not give anyone the horrors," said the s.e.xton, who attended church regularly. "It is but the Portal, Of a better life beyond."

"But it's rather nice to have the horrors sometimes," came Nancy's voice from behind the bar. "I wonder why!"

"Not but what," continued the s.e.xton, "it is not excusable now for me.

For my work is very sad and awesome indeed."

The s.e.xton had never before been so impressed with the conversational advantage of his lugubrious occupation, and he determined to make up for lost opportunities.

"I believe you, s.e.xton," said Peter Smith,

"Some of them as I've buried was all young and blooming, and others were ever so old, nearly as old as Canthrop yonder."

"Don't talk like that," said the patriarch, hoa.r.s.ely. "Ye make me afeard."

"I wonder what it is to-night," said a labourer in the corner who had hitherto drunk in silence, "that makes you all talk as if you couldn't say what you meant."

"Perhaps a man is being hanged," said the s.e.xton.

"Poor fellow!" said Nancy.

"I feel queer to-night," drawled old Canthrop. "But I don't know why that is. What is it makes it so?"

"The moon, old man, the moon."

The company started with fear at the sound of this strange voice, turned round, and with blanched faces beheld the figure of an old man framed in the doorway, with the silver light creeping along his h.o.a.ry beard, and over his unprecedented clothes. For the stranger was clothed in what appeared to be a white woollen dressing-gown, with a purple border, and he had sandals on his feet. He wore no hat, and his snowy hair waved gently in the radiance of the gaslight. He walked forward amid a dead silence, and laid his hand on old Canthrop's shoulder.

"Yes, old comrade in a life of folly," he cried. "The moon is full to-night, and you know it is her fault. Hers are the fiery drops that make your eyes water and my eyes shine. I, to whom she has revealed her secret springs of knowledge and beauty, you, who have not fifty words to your tongue--I, who feel her gentle influence pervading forest and meadow, tower and town, you, who feel only the terror of her nocturnal power that brings you to your fellows, you, the village dotard, I, the king of the world; we have one mother, old man, and that's the Moon! You see and fear the great white s.p.a.ces that flit before your eyes; I know and love her cloudy caverns of mystery and wonder."

"Who are you?" whispered old Canthrop. "Go away!"

"A minute, a minute. I am what you will, Death, Destiny, a Poet. Is John Gaffekin here?"

"Are you...." began John.

"I am the same. Ask nothing more. My dear--a drink round to all, for our farewell."

The Poet looked round, smiling at the solemn and pale faces, at the trembling hands of those that proposed his health. Then, linking his arm through John's, he took him out into the street.

"Come with me," said the Poet, "we will go to old William Price's shop."

After five minutes' walk in a silence which John Gaffekin somehow did not wish to break they arrived outside the little square brick house which was dark, silent and shuttered fast. In front of it the last gas-lamp in Blaindon glimmered in the wind-driven moon-rays.

"Call the old man," ordered the Poet.

John Gaffekin banged violently at the door and shouted: "Mr Price! Mr Price!"

"Eh, what's up the deuce and all?" came a loud but sleepy voice from the first floor. A match was struck, a light glimmered through the bars, the shutters creaked open and old Mr Price popped his nightcap out of the window.

"News from your son," cried the Poet cheerfully.