“What is this thing, Dominie; a man or a snake?  Will I kill it?”

“Bartholomew,” I began.  “When we—­”

“Not a word from you, Dominie.  My mind is made up.”

“The girl is Isabel Munn’s daughter.”

I saw a tremor shake the gaunt frame.

“When we buried Isabel Munn, you came back in the night to weep at her grave.”

He thrust out a warding hand toward me.

“Why did you weep over Isabel Munn’s grave, Bartholomew?”

“Speak no evil of the dead,” he cried wildly.

“It is not in my mind.  She was a good and pure woman.  What would she have been if she had listened to you?”

“What do you know?  Who betrayed me?”

“You, yourself.  When you came down with pneumonia after the burial, I sat with you through a night of delirium.”

Bartholomew Storrs bowed his head.

“My sin hath found me out,” he groaned.  “God knows I loved her, and—­and I hadn’t the strength not to tell her.  I’d have given up everything for her, my hope of heaven, my—­my—­I ’d have given up my office and gone away from God’s Acre!  And that was twenty years ago.  I—­I don’t sleep o’ nights yet, for thinking.”

“Well, you ain’t the only one,” said the dull voice of Mr. Hines.

“You’re tempting me!” Bartholomew Storrs snarled at him.  “You’re trying to make me false to my trust.”

“Just to let her lie by her mother, like her mother would ask you if she could.”

“Don’t say it to me!” He beat his head with his clenched hand.  Recovering command of himself, he straightened up, taking a deep breath:  “I must be guided by my conscience and my God,” he said professionally, and I noted a more reverent intonation given to the former than to the latter.  A bad sign.

“Isabel Munn’s daughter, Bartholomew,” I reminded him.

Instead of replying he staggered out of the door.  Through the window we saw him, a moment later, posting down the street, bareheaded and stony-eyed, like one spurred by tormenting thoughts.

“Will he do it, do you think?” queried the anxious-visaged Mr. Hines.

I shook my head in doubt.  With a man like Bartholomew Storrs, one can never tell.

Old memories are restless companions for the old.  So I found them that night.  But there is balm for sleeplessness in the leafy quiet of Our Square.  I went out to my bench, seeking it, and found an occupant already there.

“We ain’t the only ones that need a jab of dope, Dominie,” said Mr. Hines, hard and pink and hoarsely confidential as when I first saw him.

“No?  Who else?” Though I suspected, of course.

“Old Gloom.  He’s over in the Acre.”

“Did you meet him there?  What did he say?”

“I ducked him.  He never saw me.  He was—­well, I guess he was praying,” said Mr. Hines shamefacedly.

“Praying?  At the Munn grave?”

“That’s it.  Groaning and saying, ’A sign, O Lord!  Vouchsafe thy servant a sign!’ Kept saying it over and over.”