The clergyman went over to the fire, leaned his arms on the mantelpiece, and rested his head on them. Presently he lifted his head, went softly to the door, opened it and listened. He heard the tread of his guest above stairs, moving to and fro about the spare room. He waited. After a while there was silence in the house. Only the wind and the sea roared outside. Then Uniacke went into the kitchen, pulled out a drawer in a dresser that stood by the window, and took from it a chisel and a hammer. He carried them into the passage, furtively put on his coat and hat, and, with all the precaution of a thief, unlocked the front door and stole out into the storm. PART II. THE GRAVE. PART II. THE GRAVE. In the morning the storm was still fierce. Clouds streamed across a sky that bent lower and lower towards the aspiring sea blanched with foam. There was little light, and the Rectory parlour looked grim and wintry when Sir Graham and Uniacke met there at breakfast time. The clergyman was pale and seemed strangely discomforted and at first unable to be natural. He greeted his guest with a forcible, and yet flickering, note of cheerfulness, abrupt and unsympathetic, as he sat down behind the steaming coffee-pot. The painter scarcely responded. He was still attentive to the storm. He ate very little. "You slept?" asked Uniacke presently. "Only for a short time towards dawn. I sat at my window most of the night." "At your window?" Uniacke said uneasily. "Yes. Somebody--a man--I suppose it must have been the Skipper--came out from the shadow of this house soon after I went to my bedroom, and stole to that grave by the churchyard wall." "Really," said Uniacke. "Did he stay there?" "For some time, bending down. It seemed to me as if he were at some work, some task--or perhaps he was only praying in his mad way, poor fellow!" "Praying--yes, yes, very likely. A little more coffee?" "No, thank you. The odd thing was that after a while he ceased and returned to this house. One might have thought it was his home." "You could not see if it was the Skipper?" "No, the figure was too vague in the faint stormy light. But it must have been he. Who else would be out at such a time in such a night?" "He never heeds the weather," said Uniacke. His pale face had suddenly flushed scarlet, and he felt a pricking as of needles in his body. It seemed to him that he was transparent like a thing of glass, and that his guest must be able to see not merely the trouble of his soul, but the fact that was its cause. And the painter did now begin to observe his host's unusual agitation. "And you--your night?" he asked. "I did not sleep at all," said Uniacke quickly, telling the truth with a childish sense of relief, "I was excited." "Excited!" said Sir Graham. "The unwonted exercise of conversation. You forget that I am generally a lonely man," said the clergyman, once more drawn into the sin of subterfuge, and scorching in it almost like a soul in hell.