Peter set out reluctantly by a short-cut through wheat-fields. He didn't want to prove to himself that it had happened. He was trying to imagine that he had come on one of his surprise visits. He would find the Faun Man dreaming, sprawled like a lean hound in the twilight of the terraced garden. The sun hung large and low in the west. A breeze swept the country with a contented humming, bowing the heads of the corn. In the distance, above Curious Corner, chiseled in the greenness of the hill the white cross glistened. Through trees a spire shot up. Beneath boughs thatched roofs of the village showed faintly. He rounded a bend; the house to which he was going gazed down on him. It hadn't the look of a house of death. Its windows shone valiantly above the pallor of the rose-garden, out-staring the splendor of the fading west. He climbed the red-tiled path--came to the threshold. The door was hospitably open. Like birds hopping in and out of a hedge, the breeze and the fragrance of flowers came and went. He knocked. No one answered. He tiptoed in. A breathless silence! Mounting the stairs, he came to the door with the iron latch, which gave entrance to the Faun Man's bedroom. Flowers! He had always loved flowers. They were strewn on a bed unnaturally white and unruffled. An unnatural peace was everywhere. The sheet was turned back from the face; the brown slight hands stretched straightly down. Each was held by a woman who knelt beside him with her head bowed. The attitude of the women was tragic with jealousy. How long and graceful he looked in death! How gaunt and tired! All the striving, the brave pretending, the famished yearning which he had disguised showed plainly now. A smile hung about the corners of his mouth--a little mocking perhaps, yet tender. A bruise was on his forehead. He had the look of one who, having been puzzled, understood life at last and was content. Peter felt that he had intruded. He had no right to stay there. Those bowed heads reproached him. He felt what men often feel when death is present: the body had been put out to usury; at the end of the trafficking it belonged to women, as it had belonged to a woman before the trafficking commenced. He wandered out into the garden. Twilight weakened into darkness. His feet were always coming back to the window; he stood beneath it, looking up to where she knelt. If it were only for a moment, surely she would come to him. Again he entered. No stir of life in the house. He peered into the bedroom. She had not moved since he left. Beyond her was the door which led into the Faun Man's study. Noiselessly he stole across to it and raised the latch. The room was in darkness. Set against the open window was a desk. Moonlight drifted in on it. A chair was pushed back from it. A pen lay carelessly on the blotting-pad, waiting for the master to return. Here it was possible to believe that the mind still lived and worked.