It was at that last moment that the need of the rubber gloves became manifest. Just at the end, the dreadful nailless hand, moving painfully about, and fraught with some sudden strength, had caught the healthy one that lay near it on the coverlid, and drew it up to touch it with the things that had once been lips. The young doctor seemed relieved when he had himself seen the priest in holy orders well drenched in water with strange suspicions of sanitation in it, after a heart-felt lather of carbolic soap. * * * * * When the Rev. Athelstan came back to Jim's bedside, his face no longer wore its cheerful aspect of an hour ago. In that short time his sad experience--surely something more than a mere death-bed, such as his daily routine of life brought him to the sight of so often!--had changed it, and made him almost like another man. "I'm martal glad ye've come, master," said Jim. And, at the sound of a voice with a memory in it of the chant the windlass echoes when the anchor leaves its bed in the sand, and the last shore-boat waves God-speed to the ship set free, his hearer seemed to shake off some of the gloom that oppressed him. "I'm martal glad to see ye back," he repeats, "by token of the good lady." Athelstan takes the hand that seeks his. "Why the good lady, Jim?" he says. "Why, master, the good lady she says to me, she says, did I know where to look for soomat or other? Lard knows what! And I says to her, '_Me_ look!' I says, because I was thinking belike this drawback on my eyesight might have slipped out of memory...." "Not very likely, Jim! But if it did, Lady Arkroyd's recollected it by now." "Ye think so, master? But put it she hasn't! I'd be sorry she should come to the knowledge late in the day. These here ladies, master, they ain't a rough sart, like we"--this did not mean his hearer, only himself and his congeners--"and she might easy get tender-hearted what with thinkin' over. And _I'd_ never be the worse, bless you!" "_I_ see what you mean, Jim." The light dawns; the speaker had been till then in the dark. He has a laugh ready for it, as he adds: "You thought the lady would be unhappy when she found she'd been talking to a blind man about his eyesight? Wasn't that it?" That was it, clearly. But Jim discerns a justification for his idea, when he learns that his blindness had been fully talked over. "There's just what I said, in that, ye see!" says he. "The lady wouldn't be talking, not to hurt my feelings! Jim Coupland's feelings now!... where are we at that?" They seem to be a rare good joke to Jim. But there is material for regret in the background. "'Tain't a matter to cry one's eyes out over," says he, "but a bit of a pity, too!..." "What is, Jim?"