The very tangle of blackened timber, which still cumbered nine-tenths of the inner area, no longer struck Carlton as the unconquerable chaos it had appeared on that bitter day which seemed so many days ago; yet, when he laid white hands upon such a beam as he had easily shouldered then, he could not lift it an inch. Ah, that day! It would take him weeks to undo its evil work. The wet feet and the cutting wind, he could feel them both again, with the sweat freezing on his body, and every pore an open door to death. There was the ridge of red-stemmed firs, too far east to blunt the cold steel of that deadly wind; and here beneath him the barrier he had been building last, and must finish now before he did another thing. How firm and true was this top course, that he had laid that day with the bony fingers at his throat! Well, he would have died with a good day's work behind him . . . It must have been a very near thing . . . he wondered how near when the sexton came, and why the sexton had come at all. The man had never given a good reason. He had only just fared to think there might be something wrong. On the way indoors, the invalid stopped at a tree. It was one of the horse-chestnuts; and already every delicate extremity was swollen and sticky to the touch; and the birds sang of summer in the branches. Carlton passed on with the short, quick steps of a feeble person in a hurry. Rivers were running in his heart; he wanted to be where he could kneel. XX THE WAY OF PEACE Three years later the man was still alone, and the church still growing under his unaided but untiring hand. Indeed, from one end, it looked almost ready for the roof, the west gable rising salient through the trees, with the original window intact underneath. But this window was the exception, the sole survivor from the fire, and for the past year the rest had been one long impediment. Even now, only the three single lights, in either transept and to the right of the porch respectively, had been wrought to a finish from sill to arch; a mullioned window was just begun; the remainder all yawned to the sky in ragged gaps of varying width. But the village looked daily on the one good end, flanked by the west walls of either transept, which happened not to have a window between them, and were consequently finished. And the village was softening a little towards its outcast, though no man said so above his breath; nor was a living soul known to have been near him all these years, unless it was the new sexton to dig a grave, or a Lakenhall curate to make an entry in the parish register. There had, however, been one or two others; the first knocking at the study door on the evening of the first funeral, some months after Carlton's illness. Carlton was reading at the time. His heart stopped at the sound. It was repeated before he could bring himself to open the door. "Tom Ivey!" "That's me, sir; may I come in?" "Surely, Tom."