Carlton completed that historic stone within another hour, and actually laid it that night. Jaded in body and brain, with every nerve exhausted, he must needs do this or drop in the attempt. It was the first stone in the new church. It was finished at last. He touched it here and there with the straight-edge. He felt its angles with the square. This stone would do. He whipped out his foot-rule and measured carefully. The stone was eleven inches all ways but one. It was the exact depth for the lower courses, but it was seventeen inches long. A seventeen-inch gap must therefore be found or made for it. And Carlton went prowling round the blackened walls, with his foot-rule and his dog, before resting from his labours. The job should be finished this time, the first stone should be laid that night. A place was found in the base of the east end, over a stable portion of the plinth; the situation was of sacred omen, and Carlton cleared away the old mortar with immense energy. Then his difficulties began. There was new mortar to make; this was an altogether new undertaking. It had been Tom Ivey's affair. Carlton had tried his hand at most branches of the masonic art, but he had never attempted to mix the mortar. He barely knew how to begin. There was a heap of sand at one end of the shed, and a load of lime under cover. These were the ingredients. That he knew; but it was not enough. Suddenly, he remembered his _Building Construction_ in two volumes; the bulkier of the two treated of materials. In a minute the book was found, deep in dust, and carried to the shed for consultation on the spot. And there was only too much about mortar; the subject monopolised a column of the index; its vastness oppressed Carlton, who nevertheless attacked it then and there. A great disappointment was in store: so he was to begin by "slaking" his lime. He had forgotten that step; now he had a dim recollection of the process. According to the book it took two or three hours at least; even this minimum presupposed that the lime was a "fat lime," whatever that might be. Carlton, lacking all means of deciding such a point, gave his inclination the benefit of the doubt, and left his shovelful of quicklime under water and sand for exactly two hours and a half. This check came in the nick of time. It reminded Robert Carlton of the flesh, whose needs he had once more neglected, though now he would have cooked and eaten if only to have killed an hour. He lit a fire. He put on the kettle. He toasted some very stale bread; he boiled an egg warm from the hen-house, then another; and having eaten he rested while he must. The sun set; the new moon whitened in the sky, but as yet could not light a man at his work when it was really dark. And that was why the lantern stood so long upon the ground outside the shed, in a whirl of tiny wings, while the mortar was being mixed at last.