The flash of sunlight, however, had caught his eye and had done more than that. Its transient gleam had linked the fleeting sense of familiarity he had felt, when the coffin had been carried past him out of Wastralls, with other moments strung bead-like on the past. This was the shape, those the infinitesimal glimmers, which he had seen in visions. Again and again he had heard the hammer at work, seen the glint of polished wood, the curve of the cut clasps. The lid of Sabina’s coffin! For years his dim familiar, it was now actual and present. He shivered as if a breath laden with the odours, the dank chill of the grave, had risen from its depths. That hammering—but it was not he who had knocked in nail after nail. Byron forgot, in sudden curiosity, that curiosity with which the vision always inspired him, where he was and what he was doing. He must find out whether the lines had been completed to the last nail. Something of peculiar importance hung on this fact. Con Rosevear, having moved a little, was now between him and the grave and, in the dark oblong, the coffin was sinking out of sight. A moment more and it would be too late. With one of the movements which, in a man of his age and bulk were so surprisingly quick, Byron thrust the other aside. The sun gleam had faded, the shadows of the wintry afternoon, the shadows of the pit were closing over the coffin. Byron, on the grassy verge, leaned forward in a perilous attempt to see and, to the bystanders, it seemed as if the man, driven crazy by grief, were about to throw himself into the grave. An emotional race, they were prepared for such manifestations but, even as they closed with Leadville, to pull him back into safety, they were conscious of surprise, of a new almost grudged respect. They had not thought him fond of his wife. The sudden jerking of his arms, under the clutch of well-meaning but mistaken fingers, prevented Byron from satisfying himself as to whether the nails were all in place. This matter of the last nail had on a sudden assumed a terrible importance. If it had been hammered home he would be delivered from the obsession of this coffin which for so long he had seen in preparation. In the making of it he had had no part—and that was strange! Yes, all things considered it was very strange. He had never been able to think of his vision as an illusion. It was real and tangible but in some curious way out of reach. Now he had chanced upon it. Chance? He had been walking towards it all the time! He must know, however, whether the circles were complete, whether that last nail...