face, expanding here, contracting there, substituting chaos and
nothingness for the living man.

The Rector sat down beside him. The room was small and bare--a little
strip of carpet on the boards, a few chairs, and a little table with food
and nourishment beside the bed. On the mantelpiece was a large printed
card containing the football fixtures of the winter before. Bateson had
once been a fine player. Of late years, however, his interest had been
confined to betting heavily on the various local and county matches, and
it was to his ill-luck as a gambler no less than to the influence of the
flimsy little woman who had led him astray that his moral break-up might
be traced.

A common tale!--yet more tragic than usual. For the bedroom contained
other testimonies to the habits of a ruined man. There was a hanging
bookcase on the wall, and the Rector sitting by the bed could just make
out the titles of the books in the dim light.

Mill, Huxley, a reprint of Tom Paine, various books by Blatchford, the
sixpenny editions of "Literature and Dogma," and Renan's "Life of
Christ," some popular science volumes of Browning and Ruskin, and a group
of well-thumbed books on the birds of Mercia--the little collection,
hardly earned, and, to judge from its appearance, diligently read, showed
that its owner had been a man of intelligence. The Rector looked from it
to the figure in the bed with a pang at his heart.

All was still in the little cottage. Through the open window the Rector
could see fold after fold of the Chase stretching north and west above
the village. The moorland ridges shone clear under the moon, now bare, or
scantily plumed by gaunt trees, and now clothed in a dense blackness of