An immense golden wheel flared out of the darkness; whirled, and died away above the sea.
In the dim church the men had set down the stretcher before the iconostase. Julian felt his way cautiously amongst the rush-bottomed chairs. The men were standing about the stretcher, their fishing caps in their hands, awed into a whispering mysticism which Julian's voice harshly interrupted,—
'Go for a cloth, one of you—the largest cloth you can find.'
He had spoken loudly in defiance of the melancholy peace of the church, that received so complacently within its ready precincts the visible remains from which the spirit, troubled and uncompanioned in life, had fled. He had always thought the church complacent, irritatingly remote from pulsating human existence, but never more so than now when it accepted the dead body as by right, firstly within its walls, and lastly within its ground, to decompose and rot, the body of its priest, among the bodies of other once vital and much-enduring men.
'Kyrie, we can find only two large cloths, one a dust-sheet, and one a linen cloth to spread over the altar. Which are we to use?'
'Which is the larger?'
'Kyrie, the dust-sheet, but the altar-cloth is of linen edged with lace.'
'Use the dust-sheet; dust to dust,' said Julian bitterly.
Shocked and uncomprehending, they obeyed. The black figure now became a white expanse, under which the limbs and features defined themselves as the folds sank into place.