A spectator, had there been one, would have noticed that the sounds of snivelling and scuffling were momentarily stilled as the staircase swallowed them up. A minute later they broke out again, with louder clamour; for though Fred got most of the blows the others quickly lost their morale, seeing how completely their leader had lost his.

‘I’ll take a strap to you when I get you home,’ thundered the sacristan, ‘trying to disturb a poor gentleman at his devotions.’

‘But, Dad, he wasn’t in the church!’ protested Fred between his sobs.

‘It wasn’t your fault if he wasn’t,’ returned his father grimly.

For some months after being warned Henry Greenstream came no more to St. Cuthbert’s, Aston Highchurch. Perhaps he found another sanctuary, for certainly there was no lack of them in the district. Perhaps, since he had a motor, he found it more convenient to drive out into the country where (supposing he needed them) were churches in sparsely populated areas, untenanted by rude little boys. He had never been a man to advertise his movements, and latterly his face had worn a closed look, as if he had been concealing them from himself. But he had to tell the chauffeur where to go, and the man was immensely surprised when, one December afternoon, he received an order to drive to Aston Highchurch. ‘We hadn’t taken that road for an age,’ he afterwards explained.

‘Stop when I tap the window,’ Mr. Greenstream said, ‘and then I shall want you to do something for me.’

At the point where the footpath leads across the fields Mr. Greenstream tapped and got out of the car.

‘I’m going on to the church now,’ he said, ‘but I want you to call at the Rectory, and ask the Reverend Mr. Ripley if he would step across to the church and . . . and hear my confession. Say it’s rather urgent. I don’t know how long I shall be gone.’

The chauffeur, for various reasons, had not found Mr. Greenstream’s service congenial; he had in fact handed his notice in that morning. But something in his employer’s tremulous manner touched him, and surprising himself, he said:

‘You wouldn’t like me to go with you as far as the church, sir?’

‘Oh, no, thank you, Williams, I think I can get that far.’

‘I only thought you didn’t look very fit, sir.’

‘Is that why you decided to leave me?’ asked Mr. Greenstream, and the man bit his lip and was silent.

Mr. Greenstream walked slowly towards the church, absently and unsuccessfully trying to avoid the many puddles left by last night’s storm. It had been a violent storm, and now though the wind was gone, the sky, still burning streakily as with the embers of its own ill-temper, had a wild, sullen look.

Mr. Greenstream reached the porch but didn’t go in. Instead he walked round the church, stumbling among the graves, for some were unmarked by headstones; and on the north side, where no one ever went, the ground was untended and uneven.

It took him some minutes to make the circuit, but when he had completed it he started again. It was on his second tour that he discovered—literally stumbled against—the gargoyle, which, of course, has been replaced now. The storm had split it but the odd thing was that the two halves, instead of being splintered and separated by their fall, lay intact on the sodden grass within a few inches of each other. Mr. Greenstream could not have believed the grinning mask was so big. It had split where the spout passed through it: one half retained the chin, the other was mostly eye and cheek and ear. Mr. Greenstream could see the naked spout hanging out far above him, long and bent and shining like a black snake. The comfortless sight may have added to the burden of his thoughts, for he walked on more slowly. This time, however, he did not turn aside at the porch, but went straight in, carefully shutting the inner and outer doors behind him.

It was past four o’clock and the church was nearly dark, the windows being only visible as patches of semi-opaque brightness. But there was a light which shone with a dull red glow, a burning circle hanging in the air a foot or two from the ground. It looked like a drum that had caught fire within, but it was not truly luminous; it seemed to attract the darkness rather than repel it. For a moment Mr. Greenstream could not make out what the strange light was. But when he took a step or two towards it and felt the heat on his face and hands he knew at once. It was the stove. The zealous sacristan, mindful of the chilly day, had stoked it up until it was red hot.

Mr. Greenstream was grateful for the warmth, for his hands were cold and his teeth chattering. He would have liked to approach the stove and bend over it. But the heat was too fierce for that, it beat him back. So he withdrew to the outer radius of its influence. Soon he was kneeling, and soon—the effect of the warmth on a tired mind and a tired body, asleep.

It must have been the cold that woke him, cold, piercing cold, that seemed solid, like a slab of ice pressing against his back. The stove still glared red in front of him, but it had no more power to warm him physically than has a friendly look or a smiling face. Whence did it come, this deadly chill? Ah! He looked over his left shoulder and saw that the doors, which he remembered shutting, were now open to the sky and the north wind. To shut them again was the work of a moment. But why were they open? he wondered, turning back into the church. Why, of course, of course, the clergyman had opened them, the Rector of Aston Highchurch, who was coming at his request to hear his confession. But where was he, and why did he not speak? And what was the reddish outline that moved towards him in the darkness? For a moment his fancy confused it with the stove, or it might be the stove’s reflection, thrown on one of the pillars. But on it came, bearing before it that icy breath he now knew had nothing to do with the north wind.

‘Mr. Ripley, Mr. Ripley,’ he murmured, falling back into the warmth of the stove, feeling upon his neck its fierce assault. Then he heard a voice like no voice he had ever heard, as if the darkness spoke with the volume of a thousand tongues.

‘I am your confessor. What have you to say?’

‘My death must be my answer,’ he replied, the consciousness of annihilation on him.

When Mr. Greenstream’s chauffeur learned that the Rector was not at home he left a message and then returned to the car, for he knew from experience that his master’s unaccountable church-going often kept him a long time. But when an hour had gone by he felt vaguely anxious and decided to see if anything was the matter. To his surprise he found the church door open, and noticed a smell coming from it which he had never associated with a church. Moving gingerly in the dark, he advanced towards where a sound of hissing made itself heard. Then he struck a match, and what he saw caused him to turn and run in terror for the door. On the threshold he almost collided with Mr. Ripley, hastening from the Rectory on his errand of mercy. Together they overcame the repugnance which either of them would have felt singly, lifted Mr. Greenstream’s body from the stove across which it hung and laid it reverently on the pavement.

The newspapers at first gave out that Mr. Greenstream had been burned to death, but the medical authorities took a different view.

‘In my opinion,’ one doctor said, ‘he was dead before he even touched the stove, and paradoxical as it may seem, the physical signs indicate that he was frozen, not burned to death.

‘He was perhaps trying to warm himself—why, we shall never know.’