was quite possible that there was more or less moonlight. But that
there was no light that night in the form of sunlight, Mullins was
absolutely certain. All that, I say, came out in court.

But meanwhile the rector had gone upstairs to his study and had
seated himself in front of his table to write his letters. It was
here always that he wrote his sermons. From the window of the room
you looked through the bare white maple trees to the sweeping outline
of the church shadowed against the night sky, and beyond that, though
far off, was the new cemetery where the rector walked of a Sunday (I
think I told you why): beyond that again, for the window faced the
east, there lay, at no very great distance, the New Jerusalem. There
were no better things that a man might look towards from his study
window, nor anything that could serve as a better aid to writing.

But this night the Dean's letters must have been difficult indeed to
write. For he sat beside the table holding his pen and with his head
bent upon his other hand, and though he sometimes put a line or two
on the paper, for the most part he sat motionless. The fact is that
Dean Drone was not trying to write letters, but only one letter. He
was writing a letter of resignation. If you have not done that for
forty years it is extremely difficult to get the words.

So at least the Dean found it. First he wrote one set of words and
then he sat and thought and wrote something else. But nothing seemed
to suit.

The real truth was that Dean Drone, perhaps more than he knew
himself, had a fine taste for words and effects, and when you feel
that a situation is entirely out of the common, you naturally try, if