Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/295

Rh circumstances perhaps not noticeable unless it were for a look of extreme weariness which had lasted even into the rest of death.

"We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body (when the sea shall give up her dead), and the life of the world to come.…"

Together we balanced it on the gunwale, and with the help of the stern-board tilted it over. It dropped, into fifteen fathoms of water.

There was another funeral next day in Lansulyan churchyard—where so many have come to be buried who never in life heard the name of Lansulyan: the harvest of Menawhidden, commemorated on weatherbeaten stones and, within the church, on many tablets which I used to con on Sundays during the Vicar's discourses. The life-boat men had mustered in force, and altogether there was a large attendance at the graveside. At one point a fit of coughing interrupted the Vicar in his recital of the service. I was the one auditor, however, who understood the meaning of it.

That evening we took our dessert again under the great elm. Somehow I felt certain he would choose this hour for his explanation: and in due course it came.

"I'm a truth-speaking man by habit," he began after a long gaze upwards at the rooks now settling to roost and making a mighty pother of it. "But