The three of them sat in the kitchen without fire or light, and the younger men said nothing while the old man put his case. They stared at him dumbly in the dusky place, seeing little through the gloom but the silver of hair and whisker round his head, and hearing his voice, when they looked away, as if it came from nobody at all, the vibrating old voice that had mostly been used for greeting and song and seemed to have borrowed a sweetness from the violin. There were only the three of them in the shadowed room, but it always seemed possible that there might be more. Sometimes, indeed, Thomas forgot that John was no longer there, and strained his eyes towards the corners to make sure. He had always been so still and rare of speech that death did not seem to have taken him away. Afterwards, it seemed to Thomas that many had sat in judgment on the case, for shame can multiply a face or two into a crowd. The wettest moon he had ever seen had suddenly appeared at a pane, like a stranger walking and staring round the house; and where the waves were breaking below the farmyard wall was the dismal wash of a rain-whipped, lifeless tide. Old Christopher Sill had not beaten about the bush; indeed, he was disconcertingly direct. He told them quite simply that he had had notice to quit, making no attempt at either excuse or complaint. Both, of course, had guessed that the end was getting near, but it came as a shock when finally declared. The thing was common enough, indeed, in such lives as theirs, but it had not happened to the Sills for more than a hundred years. They had just gone on, father and son, until they chanced to come to Kit, and, if John had lived, he might very possibly have gone on, too. They had often wondered, Thomas and Bob, why he had never pressed his father to resign, but they guessed at the double reason now. John’s feet had long been set on a different road, and the money behind the farm had been dwindling every year. Money vanished with Kit as the notes of his fiddle fluted out to sea, and he troubled as little about it as about the music-gold that he could so easily recreate. The steady downgrade on which he had lived had not been able to push the lesson home. It had never seemed possible that he could leave the farm, and the bare formality of a notice to quit could not make it possible now. Surely there could be nothing more right than that a man should spend his last breath where he was born, and especially one of the rooted, marsh-bred Sills? He only asked for a year or two at the end of all that had gone; couldn’t Thomas and Bob see that he had that? A year or two, happen—and happen not so much. He wouldn’t be long at his dying, he felt sure.