"I was sitting where I am sitting now one evening and she [his wife] was sitting where you are sitting and you were running round, and the preacher climbed the hill to us and he came in and he said to me, 'William,' he said, 'it is decided that the big window is to be walled up. When can you do it?' That was the way he said it, Alvin. I said to him, 'I can do it to-morrow. I had other work for the afternoon at Zion Church, but I can put it off.' She could have told you that that was just what he said and what I said. I was in the congregation and there was at that time no other mason but me in Millerstown. It was to be made all smooth, so that nobody could ever tell there was a window there. Then the preacher, he said to me,--she could tell you that, too, if she were here,--he said, 'Come in the morning and I will give you the key of the communion cupboard,' the little cupboard in the wall, Alvin. There the communion set was kept. It was silver, real silver, all shiny." William's hands began to tremble and he moistened his dry lips. William spoke of objects which were to him manifestly holy. His son bent his head now, not idly and indifferently, but stubbornly. He remembered the names which the boys had shouted at his father; with all his soul he recoiled from hearing his father's confession. "There was a silver pitcher, so high, and a silver plate and a silver cup on a stem like a goblet. The preacher put it away there and he locked the door always. "But he gave me the key and I went to my work. I thought once I would have to open the door and I stuck the key in the lock. It was a funny key. "But I didn't need to open the door. I took my dinner along--she could tell you that. But I didn't need to open the door, and I took the key out again and put it in my pocket, and when I finished I swept everything up nice and locked the church door and came down the pike. It was night already and I went to the preacher and gave him the two keys, the church key and the other, and got my money. That quick he paid me, Alvin. He said to me, 'Well, I guess you had a quiet day, William,' and I said, 'Yes, nobody looked in at me but a little one.' That is what I said to the preacher _then_, Alvin, exactly that, but it was not true. But I thought it was true. "Then I came home and I told her how nice and smooth I had made it--to this day, you cannot see it was a window there. Now, listen, Alvin!" The sunset sky was darkening, a rising wind rattled the door in its latch. The little house was lonely on a winter night, even a bright night like this. The boy began to be frightened, his father looked at him with such dagger-like keenness.