There he stood irresolute. What next? He was to have been the guest of the treasurer of the church that night, after the ordination. It was a pretty, luxurious home; he had been entertained there so often that he felt at home in it; the family had been his affectionate friends, and the children were fond of him. He thought of that comfortable guest-room with the weakest pang that he had known yet: he felt ill enough to go to bed. But they had not asked the dishonored minister, now, to be their guest. It did not occur to him, so sore at heart was he, that he had given them no opportunity. He was about to return to the station, with a vague purpose to seek shelter in some hotel in a village where nobody knew him, when a plain, elderly woman dressed in black approached him. He recognized her as one of the obscurer people of his lost parish. She had been comforted by something he had said one Sunday; she had come timidly to tell him so, after the fashion of such women; she had known trouble, he remembered, and poverty, it was clear. “Ah, Mrs. Granite!” he said pathetically. “Did you take all the trouble to come to say good-by to _me_?” “You look so tired, sir!” sobbed Mrs. Granite. “You look down sick abed! We thought you wasn’t fit to travel to-night, sir, and if you wouldn’t mind coming home with us to get a night’s rest, Mr. Bayard? We live very poor, sir, not like you; but me and my girl, we couldn’t _bear_ to see you going off so! We’d take it for an honor, Mr. Bayard, sir!” “I will come,” said the weary man. And he went, at once. Certain words confusedly recurred to him as he walked silently beside Mrs. Granite, “He had not where,” they ran,--“He had not where to lay his head.” The light burned late in the clean, spare room in the cottage of the fisherman’s widow on Windover Point that night. Early in the morning her mother sent Jane Granite running for the doctor; and by night it was well known in Windover that the new minister was ill. He was threatened with something with a Latin name; not epidemic in Windover, whose prevailing diseases are measles and alcoholism. Mrs. Granite found the minister’s anticipated malady hard to pronounce; but Jane, who had been at the high school, called it meningitis.