People had a habit of asking Anthony his age; and when he told them they would look at him very hard and say: “Are you quite sure?” His uncle was taken ill late in the year. He had caught rheumatic fever getting himself wet through on the moors. He made a boast of never wearing an overcoat. Anthony found him sitting up in bed. A carpenter friend had fixed him up a pulley from the ceiling by which he could raise himself with his hands. Old Simon was sitting watching him, his chin upon the bed. Simon had been suffering himself from rheumatism during the last two winters and seemed to understand. “Don’t tell your aunt,” he said. “She’ll have them all praying round me and I’ll get no peace. But I’ve got a feeling it’s the end. I’m hoping to slip off on the quiet, like.” Anthony asked if he could do anything. He had always liked his uncle; they felt there was a secret bond between them. “Look after the old chap,” his uncle answered; “that is if I go first.” He stretched out a stiff arm and laid it on old Simon’s head. “Ninety years old he’ll be on the fourteenth,” he said, “reckoning six years of a dog’s life as equal to one of a man’s. And I’m sixty-five. We haven’t done so badly, either of us.” Anthony drew up a chair and sat down between the two. “Nothing you want to talk about, is there?” he asked. The old man knew what he meant. He shook his head. “Been talking about it or listening to it, on and off, pretty well all my life,” he answered. “Never got any further.” He was silent a while, wrestling with his pain. “Of course, I believe in a God,” he said. “There must be Somebody bossing it all. It’s the things they tell you about Him that I’ve never been able to swallow. Don’t fit in with common sense to my thinking.” “You’re not afraid?” Anthony asked him after a silence. “Why should I be?” answered the old man. “He knows me. He ain’t expecting anything wonderful. If I’m any good maybe He’ll find me a job. If not----” Old Simon had crept closer. They were looking into each other’s eyes. “Wonder if there’ll be any dogs?” he said. “Don’t see why there shouldn’t. If love and faithfulness and self-forgetfulness are going to be of any use to Him, what’s wrong with you, old chap?” He laughed. “Don’t tell your aunt I said that,” he cautioned Anthony. “She’s worried enough about me, poor old girl, as it is.” His aunt had looked for a death-bed repentance, but the end came before she expected it, in the night. “He wasn’t really a bad man,” she said, crying. “That’s what made me hope, right to the end, that the Truth would be revealed to him.” Anthony sought to comfort her. “Perhaps it came to him when he was alone,” he said. She clung to that.