Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/292

284 the sound of their footsteps died away: Trudgeon's down the hill towards the Porth, the Vicar's up towards the church-town.

After this I had some painful minutes. As they dragged by, an abominable curiosity took hold of me, an itch to open the door of the shed, strike a match, and have a look at the dead face I had never seen. Then came into my mind a passage in the Republic which I had read a fortnight before—how that one Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piræus under the north wall of the city, observed some corpses lying on the ground at the place of execution; and how he fought between his desire to look and his abhorrence until at length, the fascination mastering him, he forced his eyes open with his fingers and ran up exclaiming, "Look, wretches, look! Feed your fill on the fair sight!" … My seat was an inverted flower-pot, and clinging to it I began to count. If the Vicar did not arrive before I reached five hundred, why, then … "Hist!" He had fetched his compass round by the back of the garden, treading so softly that the signal sounded almost in my ear and fetched me off my flower-pot in a nervous quake. He wore a heavy pea-jacket, and, as a smell of hot varnish announced, carried a dark lantern beneath it. He had strapped this to his waistbelt to leave both hands free.

We lifted the body out and carried it across the