The night was clear and pleasant, but to a lonely man the far-shining brilliance of the Blaindon Arms appeared more pleasant still: and so he turned on his heel and swung in through the unaccustomed door. "Why, bless me, Mr Gaffekin," said Nancy, "it's a long time since you've been in." "It is, indeed, Nancy. How's life?" "Oh, just as usual, Mr Gaffekin, thank you. Have you heard from Mr Price again?" "Not a word," said John. "Not a single word since last summer." "Now, that's odd, sir," said Peter Smith, "very odd." "I tell you what," said Thomas Bodkin, the sexton, with prodigious wisdom, "he's fallen in love." "He wasn't much that sort, Mr Bodkin," said Nancy, with a little sigh. It pleased her to imagine that her heart was broken. "Damned silly," said old Canthrop. "Damned silly. Never tould his feyther." "And the old man so cut up about it," said Peter Smith. "Yes," said John. "Didn't get back to business for nearly a week." "Ah, it's curious to think of him so far away," said Nancy. "Out there in Aljanda. That is, if he wasn't killed in the row." "Ah, if...." said the sexton ominously. The _Daily Mail_ had contained one day a few months ago a small paragraph which had caused quite an excitement in the village of Blaindon, reporting "considerable fermentation in the little State of Alsander." But the succeeding numbers had no further information on the subject, being well stocked with letters answering the grave question "Is the stage immoral?" which the great paper had proposed to itself with typical earnestness and audacity. The inhabitants of Blaindon, however, were not deterred by the meagreness of the data from an almost daily discussion as to whether their fellow townsman had perished. "You cheer up, Nancy," said John Oggs, who was the sexton's opponent in the controversy. "Price is all right, and he'll turn up again one of these days, all boiled yellow by the sun." "What a strange thing Life is," said Nancy. "A strange thing indeed," said old Canthrop. "A strange thing." "The sun makes one red, not yellow," said the sexton. "But it's small colour he's showing now, poor boy, I can tell you. In them furrin parts knives aint reserved for cheese. And he'd have written for sure." "Ah, sexton," said John to escape the perpetual topic, "I can see you're a man of ideas." "Well, Mr Gaffekin, I may not have been to Oxford, as I say, but I does think. As I said to Parson once before a burial. 'You and I, sir,' I said, 'are thinking men.' It goes with the business." "It must be dreadful work," said John Oggs. "Digging holes for dead men. Well, we must all go under." "Ay, indeed," said old Canthrop. "Don't speak from the bottom of your throat like that," said Peter Smith. "It gives me the horrors, with all this talk about death and all." "Death should not give anyone the horrors," said the sexton, who attended church regularly. "It is but the Portal, Of a better life beyond."