A smile--contemptuous and good-humoured--crossed the Rector's face. Any angry bigot determined to rid his parish of a heretical parson might no doubt be tempted to use other than legal and theological weapons, if he could get them. A heretic with unpaid bills and some hidden vice is scarcely in a position to make much of his heresy. But the Rector's smile showed him humorously conscious of an almost excessive innocence of private life. The thought of how little an enemy could find to lay hold on in his history or present existence seemed almost to bring with it a kind of shamefacedness--as for experience irrevocably foregone, warm, tumultuous, human experience, among the sinners and sufferers of the world. For there are odd, mingled moments in the lives of most scholars and saints--like Renan in his queer envy of Theophile Gautier--when such men inevitably ask themselves whether they have not missed something irreplaceable, the student, by his learning--the saint even, by his goodness. Here now was "Miners' Row." As the Rector approached the cottage of which he was in search the clouds lightened in the east, and a pale moonshine, suffusing the dusk, showed in the far distance beyond the village, the hills of Fitton Chase, rounded, heathy hills, crowned by giant firs. Meynell looked at them with longing, and a sudden realization of his own weariness. A day or two, perhaps a week or two, among the fells, with their winds and scents about him, and their streams in his ears--he must allow himself that, before the fight began. No. 8. A dim light showed in the upper window. The Rector knocked at the door. A woman opened--a young and sweet-looking nurse in her bonnet and long cloak. "You look pretty done!" exclaimed the Rector. "Has he been giving trouble?" "Oh, no, sir, not more than usual. It's the two of them." "She won't go to her sister's?" "She won't stir a foot, sir." "Where is she?" The nurse pointed to the living-room on her left. "She scarcely eats anything--a sup of tea sometimes. And I doubt whether she sleeps at all." "And she won't go to him?" "If he were dying, and she alone with him in the house, I don't believe she'd go near him." The Rector stepped in and asked a few questions as to arrangements for the night. The patient, it seemed, was asleep, in consequence of a morphia injection, and likely to remain so for an hour or two. He was dying of an internal injury inflicted by a fall of rock in the mine some ten days before. Surgery had done what it could, but signs of blood-poisoning had appeared, and the man's days were numbered.