The man’s arm fell like a snapped bough, and the bell came to the earth with a dull, metallic rattle. The skull face, unmasked now that the end was near, betrayed that the bell carrier had been starved by the famine that the King’s host had left behind them in those parts. He was blind and deaf with the death fog, nor did he know that Marpasse was near him till she spoke. “Good soul, have pity.” He turned his blind face towards Marpasse. “I am going yonder out of the world, and it is bad to be alone when the evil spirits are abroad, and to hear no prayer spoken. I rang my bell, good soul, for St. Chrysostom, he of the golden mouth, promised me that I should not die alone in the dark.” Marpasse sat down beside him, and beckoned Denise to her. “Rest in peace, brother. What would comfort you?” The man lay very still, with a face like ivory. He scarcely seemed to breathe. “A Pater Noster,” he said presently, “I cannot come by a prayer, for the words run to and fro in my head like rabbits in a warren.” Marpasse looked at Denise. “Here is a Sister who knows all the prayers,” she said. “Ah, there is the smell of good meat a-cooking in a prayer. I saw the Host through a leper squint not a month ago. Pray, good souls, and I will ask the Lord Christ to shrive me.” Denise knelt in the grass, with Marpasse huddled close to her, and spoke prayers for the leper’s lips, and found comfort and sweetness for her own soul in the praying. Presently the man held up a shaking hand, and made the sign of the Cross in the air. “Good souls,” he asked them, speaking as though he had a bone in his throat, “unfasten my girdle from about my body.” Marpasse’s hands answered his desire. The girdle had a leather pouch fastened to it, and the pouch was heavy. Marpasse gave it into his hands, and he laid it against his mouth, and then held it towards Denise. “I would rather you had it, Sister, than some begging friar. There is money in it, the alms of five years, and God bless the charitable. Take it, good souls. Dead men want no gold, though you will have candles burnt, and prayers put up for Peter the Leper.” He felt for his bell and they heard a great sigh come out of his body like the sound of a spirit soaring away on invisible wings. The bell gave a last spasmodic tinkle that was muffled and smothered by the grass. Then all was still, save for a light breeze that stirred the black boughs of the yews. Denise knelt there awhile in prayer. Marpasse had gone aside and had cut down a yew bough with her knife, and was shaping the end thereof into the shape of a narrow spade. She began to turn the sods up clear of the roots of the trees, and Denise came and watched her, holding the dead man’s girdle in her hands. It took Marpasse till midnight to scratch a shallow grave. They laid the leper in it, with his bell in his hand, and his staff beside him, and covered him with sods and boughs.