He rebuked himself, and bent again to his work. The setting sun poured in from the west, making the little room, with its faded, peeling walls, and mangy furniture, a tub of swimming light. Mr. Sumption had got down to his Fourthly when his thoughts went off again, and this time after a boy who was not dead. It was a couple of months since he had heard from Jerry, and the letter had been unsatisfactory, though by this time he should have learned not to expect so much from Jerry’s letters. He lifted his head from the paper with a sigh, and, chin propped on hand, gazed out of the window to where bars of heavy crimson cloud reefed the blue bay of light. He remembered an evening nearly a year ago, when he and Jerry had sat by the window of a poor lodging-house room in Kemp Town, and felt nearer to each other than before in their lives.... “Reckon he can’t help it—reckon he’s just a vessel of wrath.” He bit his tongue as a cure for weakness, and for another ten minutes bobbed and fumed over his notes. The sermon was not going well. He had taken for his text: “Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand; a day of darkness and of gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains.” He told the congregation that their grief for the death of these young men was but part of the universal woe, a spark of that furnace which should devour the world. Melting together in Doomsday fires the Book of Revelation and the Minor Prophets, he pointed out how the Scriptures had been fulfilled ... the Beast, the False Prophet, the Army from the North, the Star called Wormwood, the Woman on Seven Hills, the Vision of Four Horns, the Crowns of Joshua, the Flying Roll, all these were in the world to-day, Signs in the rolling clouds of smoke that poured from the burning fiery furnace, where only the Children of God could walk unharmed. “And the Sign of the Son of Man shall be in the heavens....” Here it was that again his thoughts became treacherous to his theme. Instead of the Sign of the Son of Man appearing in the heavens, he seemed to see it rising out of the earth, the crosses on the million graves of Flanders. Could it be that Christ was already come? ... come in the brave and patient sufferings of boys, who died that the world might live?... “It is expedient that one man should die for the people.” He drove away the thought as a blasphemy, and stooped once more to his paper, while his finger rubbed under the lines of his big Bible beside him.