Now the painter was installed at the Vicarage, and blessed, each hour, his happy escape from the inn, whose walls seemed expanded by the forcible and athletic smell of stale fish.
Uniacke's servant girl brought in the tea. The two men had it by the fire. Presently Hamilton said:
"Nightfall is very interesting and curious here."
"I find it so almost everywhere," Uniacke said.
"Yes. It can never be dull. But here, in winter at least, it is extraordinarily—" he paused for the exactly right word, in a calm way that was peculiar to him and that seemed to emphasise his fine self-possession—"pathetic, and suggestive of calamity."
"I have noticed that, indeed," Uniacke answered, "and never, I think, more than to-night."
Hamilton looked across at him in the firelight.
"Where did you see it fall?" he asked.
"I was by the wall of the churchyard."
"It was you, then, whom I saw from the window. It seemed to be a mourner looking at the graves."