The beautiful little boy with eyes like blue stones, and lashes that sprayed open from them like flower-petals had finished telling his sin to Father Schwartz--and the square of sunshine in which he sat had moved forward half an hour into the room. Rudolph had become less frightened now; once eased of the story a reaction had set in. He knew that as long as he was in the room with this priest God would not stop his heart, so he sighed and sat quietly, waiting for the priest to speak. Father Schwartz's cold watery eyes were fixed upon the carpet pattern on which the sun had brought out the swastikas and the flat bloomless vines and the pale echoes of flowers. The hall-clock ticked insistently toward sunset, and from the ugly room and from the afternoon outside the window arose a stiff monotony, shattered now and then by the reverberate clapping of a far-away hammer on the dry air. The priest's nerves were strung thin and the beads of his rosary were crawling and squirming like snakes upon the green felt of his table top. He could not remember now what it was he should say. Of all the things in this lost Swede town he was most aware of this little boy's eyes--the beautiful eyes, with lashes that left them reluctantly and curved back as though to meet them once more. For a moment longer the silence persisted while Rudolph waited, and the priest struggled to remember something that was slipping farther and farther away from him, and the clock ticked in the broken house. Then Father Schwartz stared hard at the little boy and remarked in a peculiar voice: "When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering." Rudolph started and looked quickly at Father Schwartz's face. "I said--" began the priest, and paused, listening. "Do you hear the hammer and the clock ticking and the bees? Well, that's no good. The thing is to have a lot of people in the centre of the world, wherever that happens to be. Then"--his watery eyes widened knowingly--"things go glimmering." "Yes, Father," agreed Rudolph, feeling a little frightened. "What are you going to be when you grow up?" "Well, I was going to be a baseball-player for a while," answered Rudolph nervously, "but I don't think that's a very good ambition, so I think I'll be an actor or a Navy officer." Again the priest stared at him. "I see _exactly_ what you mean," he said, with a fierce air. Rudolph had not meant anything in particular, and at the implication that he had, he became more uneasy. "This man is crazy," he thought, "and I'm scared of him. He wants me to help him out some way, and I don't want to." "You look as if things went glimmering," cried Father Schwartz wildly. "Did you ever go to a party?" "Yes, Father."