man's arm, muttering a refusal, but Greatorex had moved to the bed and
drawn back the sheet.

What Gwenda Cartaret had seen was revealed.

The dead man's face, upturned with a slight tilt to the ceiling that
bulged so brutally above it, the stiff dark beard accentuating the
tilt, the eyes, also upturned, white under their unclosing lids, the
nostrils, the half-open mouth preserved their wonder and their terror
before a thing so incredible--that the walls and roof of a man's room
should close round him and suffocate him. On this horrified face there
were the marks of dissolution, and, at the corners of the grim beard
and moustache, a stain.

It left nothing to be said. It was the face of the man who had drunk
hard and had told his son that he had never been the worse for drink.

Jim Greatorex stood and looked at it as if he knew what Rowcliffe was
thinking of it and defied him to think.

Rowcliffe drew up the sheet and covered it. "You'd better come out of
this. It isn't good for you," he said.

"I knaw what's good for me, Dr. Rawcliffe."

Jim stuck his hands in his breeches and gazed stubbornly at the
sheeted mound.

"Come," Rowcliffe said, "don't give way like this. Buck up and be a
man."