He walked away alone as the dark cortège set itself in movement, his mind strangely accustomed to the fact that Paul would no longer frequent their house and that the long black figure would no longer stroll, tall and lean, between the lemon-trees in the garden. The fact was more simple and more easily acceptable than he could have anticipated. It seemed already quite an old-established fact. He remembered with a shock of surprise, and a raising of his eyebrows, that he yet had to communicate it to Eve. He knew it so well himself that he thought every one else must know it too. He was immeasurably more distressed by the tardy realisation of his own egotism in regard to Paul, than by the fact of Paul's death. He walked very slowly, delaying the moment when he must speak to Eve. He sickened at the prospect of the numerous inevitable inquiries that would be made to him by both his father and his uncle. He would never hint to them that the priest had had a private trouble. He rejoiced to remember his former loyalty, and to know that Eve remained ignorant of that extraordinary, unexplained conversation when Paul had talked about the mice. Mice in the church! He, Julian, must see to the decent covering of the body. And of the face, especially of the face. An immense golden wheel flared out of the darkness; whirled, and died away above the sea. In the dim church the men had set down the stretcher before the iconostase. Julian felt his way cautiously amongst the rush-bottomed chairs. The men were standing about the stretcher, their fishing caps in their hands, awed into a whispering mysticism which Julian's voice harshly interrupted,-- 'Go for a cloth, one of you--the largest cloth you can find.' He had spoken loudly in defiance of the melancholy peace of the church, that received so complacently within its ready precincts the visible remains from which the spirit, troubled and uncompanioned in life, had fled. He had always thought the church complacent, irritatingly remote from pulsating human existence, but never more so than now when it accepted the dead body as by right, firstly within its walls, and lastly within its ground, to decompose and rot, the body of its priest, among the bodies of other once vital and much-enduring men. 'Kyrie, we can find only two large cloths, one a dust-sheet, and one a linen cloth to spread over the altar. Which are we to use?' 'Which is the larger?' 'Kyrie, the dust-sheet, but the altar-cloth is of linen edged with lace.' 'Use the dust-sheet; dust to dust,' said Julian bitterly. Shocked and uncomprehending, they obeyed. The black figure now became a white expanse, under which the limbs and features defined themselves as the folds sank into place. 'He is completely covered over?' 'Completely, Kyrie.' 'The mice cannot run over his face?' 'Kyrie, no!' 'Then no more can be done until one of you ride into Herakleion for the doctor.'