The keeper waited gravely for the priest’s approval, but Paul was looking at the dog, now quiet and docile at his master’s bidding, and he was thinking to himself:

‘If we could only thus keep our passions on a leash!’ And then he said aloud, but in an absent-minded way, ‘Oh yes, he can wait till the doctor comes to-morrow. But he is seriously ill, all the same.’

‘Well then, if he is seriously ill,’ persisted the keeper firmly and not without contempt for the priest’s apparent indifference, ‘a man had better go for the doctor at once. The old fellow can pay, he is not a pauper. But his granddaughter disobeyed my orders and did not give him the medicine I myself prepared and left for him.’

‘He should receive the Communion first of all,’ said Paul.

‘But you have told me that a sick person may receive the Communion even if they are not fasting?’

‘Well then,’ said the priest, losing patience at last, ‘the old man did not want the medicine; he clenched his teeth, and he has them all still sound, and struck out as if nothing was the matter with him.’

‘And then the granddaughter, in my humble opinion,’ continued the keeper indignantly, ‘has no right to order me, an official, to rush off for the doctor as though I were a servant! It was not a question of an accident or anything requiring the doctor’s official presence, and I have other things to do. I must now go down to the river by the ford, because I have received information that some benefactor of his neighbours has placed dynamite in the water to destroy the trout. My respects!’

He repeated the military salute and departed, jerking his dog up by the leash. Suddenly sharing its master’s repressed contempt, the animal stalked off waving its ferocious tail; it did not growl at the priest, but merely turned its head to give him a parting glance of menace out of its savage eyes.

Having completed his preparations for carrying extreme unction to the old man, Antiochus was leaning over the parapet of the piazza under the shade of the elms, waiting for the priest; and when he saw him approaching, the boy darted into the sacristy and waited with the surplice in his hands. The pair were ready in a few minutes, Paul in surplice and stole, carrying the silver amphora of oil, Antiochus robed in red from head to foot and holding a brocade umbrella with gold fringe open over Paul’s head, so that he and his silver amphora were in shadow whilst the boy himself appeared the more brilliant in the sunshine in contrast to the black and white figure of the priest. Antiochus’s face wore a look of almost tragic gravity, for he was much impressed with his own importance and imagined himself specially deputed to protect the holy oil. Nevertheless this did not prevent him from grinning with amusement at the sight of the old men hurriedly shuffling down from the parapet as the little procession passed, and the boys kneeling with their faces to the wall instead of towards the priest. The youngsters jumped up immediately, however, and followed Antiochus, who rang his bell before each door to warn the people; dogs barked, the weavers stopped their looms and the women thrust their heads out of the windows to see, and the whole village, was in a tremor of mysterious excitement.