first touch of the finger of death reaching out to her--had sat with her
son in the warm darkness in the little grass plot at the front of the
house. It was a clear, warm, starlit evening without a moon, and as the
two sat closely together a sense of the coming of death crept over the
mother.

At the evening meal Windy McPherson had talked voluminously, ranting and
shouting about the house. He said that a housepainter who had a real sense
of colour had no business trying to work in a hole like Caxton. He had
been in trouble with a housewife about a colour he had mixed for painting
a porch floor and at his own table he raved about the woman and what he
declared her lack of even a primitive sense of colour. "I am sick of it
all," he shouted, going out of the house and up the street with uncertain
steps. His wife had been unmoved by his outburst, but in the presence of
the quiet boy whose chair touched her own she trembled with a strange new
fear and began to talk of the life after death, making effort after effort
to get at what she wanted to say, and only succeeding in finding
expression for her thoughts in little sentences broken by long painful
pauses. She told the boy she had no doubt at all that there was some kind
of future life and that she believed she should see and live with him
again after they had finished with this world.

One day the minister who had been annoyed because he had slept in his
church, stopped Sam on the street to talk to him of his soul. He said that
the boy should be thinking of making himself one of the brothers in Christ
by joining the church. Sam listened silently to the talk of the man, whom
he instinctively disliked, but in his silence felt there was something
insincere. With all his heart he wanted to repeat a sentence he had heard
from the lips of grey-haired, big-fisted Valmore--"How can they believe
and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their belief?" He