“Curious how this has affected me, David,” he said apologetically.  “It is incredible, this weakness of mine.  I have seen death many scores of times, and yet I could not go and look on his face again.  Incredible!  Yet it is so.  I am anxious to get away.  Mukoki will soon be coming with the dogs.  A devil, Mukoki says.  Well, perhaps.  A strange man at best.  We must forget this night.  It has been an unpleasant introduction for you into our North.  We must forget it.  We must forget Tavish.”  And then, as if he had omitted a fact of some importance, he added:  “I will kneel at his graveside before we go.”

“If he had only waited,” said David, scarcely knowing what words he was speaking, “if he had waited until to-morrow, only, or the next day....”

“Yes; if he had waited!”

The Missioner’s eyes narrowed.  David heard the click of his jaws as he dropped his head so that his face was hidden.

“If he had waited,” he repeated, after David, “if he had only waited!” And his hands, spread out fan-like ever the stove, closed slowly and rigidly as if gripping at the throat of something.

“I have friends up in that country he came from,” David forced himself to say, “and I had hoped he would be able to tell me something about them.  He must have known them, or heard of them.”

“Undoubtedly,” said the Missioner, still looking at the top of the stove, and unclenching his fingers as slowly as he had drawn them together, “but he is dead.”

There was a note of finality in his voice, a sudden forcefulness of meaning as he raised his head and looked at David.

“Dead,” he repeated, “and buried.  We are no longer privileged even to guess at what he might have said.  As I told you once before, David, I am not a Catholic, nor a Church-of-England man, nor of any religion that wears a name, and yet I accepted a little of them all into my own creed.  A wandering Missioner—­and I am such a one—­must obliterate to an extent his own deep-souled convictions and accept indulgently all articles of Christian faith; and there is one law, above all others, which he must hold inviolate.  He must not pry into the past of the dead, nor speak aloud the secrets of the living.  Let us forget Tavish.”

His words sounded a knell in David’s heart.  If he had hoped that Father Roland would, at the very last, tell him something more about Tavish, that hope was now gone.  The Missioner spoke in a voice that was almost gentle, and he came to David and put a hand on his shoulder as a father might have done with a son.  He had placed himself, in this moment, beyond the reach of any questions that might have been in David’s mind.  With eyes and touch that spoke a deep affection he had raised a barrier between them as inviolable as that law of his creed which he had just mentioned.  And with it had come a better understanding.