“I’ll go and get you some water, if you’ll get up.” “Well, go and get it then.” She goes to the pump, and he drags himself out of bed. He is short and thick-set, with bulging flesh. He has been sleeping in an old pair of flannel trousers. He sits on a box by the window. He looks out beyond the garden, over the meadow and the quiet river, to where the trees cover a hill on the other side. Their green dresses are blurred by the delicate blue mist that swims softly round them, the deep shade yawns the sleep away. In the meadows some cows lie in the open, it is not hot enough yet to drive them under the hedges. Below, a hen chuckles with satisfaction. How quiet it all was, nothing wrong in the best of all possible worlds. They thought that, all the rest of them, they did not care. And he was forgotten. Nature insulted him. What right had the country to look like this, basking in the sunshine while he lived in the middle of it? He with his great thoughts, his great sufferings. Why didn’t the State support him, instead of letting him live in squalor? He deserved as much of the money from the bloated capitalist as anyone else. It was their class that had brought him to this, they had never paid him enough, for one thing. It was their fault. Where was the water? To-day was going to go badly, it was going to be terribly hot. Sunday too, so that the church bells would ring and then he would remember Barwood church, the little altar, the roses--his roses--growing outside. He felt so ill to-day, not at all strong. He would weep when the bells rang, weep because so many things were over, the Colonel calling him Padre, the deference of the churchwarden. How great his tears would be. All that was so far and yet so close. Every day he thought it over. But there was no need to regret it, he was working out his salvation here, if he had stayed on in that Vicarage he would have been dead alive. He was so vital here, and then somehow the grasp of it would leave him. He was ill to-day all the same, he felt it inside, something seriously the matter. Was it the cancer? There, turning over and over. Yes, there it was. Here; no, there; no, no, there. Yes. Cancer, that he had been awaiting so long. “Here’s the water.” He winced. The noise the girl made. Was he not ill? “I am ill.” “Again?” “It’s the cancer at last.” There was a certain satisfaction now that it had come. “Again. The doctor will cost you a bottle just for telling you it’s imagination. I know them and you.” “Go away, go away.” She was essentially small in character, like that mistaken woman her mother. Oh, he couldn’t any more. Cancer coming on top of it all. What a fine tragedy his was. And it would cut short his great work, before even it had been begun. She opened the door downstairs and went into the kitchen. He was much the same to-day, a little stronger perhaps, but that would go till he stoked up in the evening. Poor, weak creature.