Secret Bread

There was silence in the room where James Ruan lay in the great bed, awaiting his marriage and his death-a silence so hushed that it was not broken, only faintly stirred, by the knocking of a fitful wind at the casement, and the occasional collapse of the glowing embers on the hearth. The firelight flickered over the whitewashed walls, which were dimmed to a pearly greyness by the stronger light without; the sick man's face was deep in shadow under the bed canopy, but one full-veined hand showed dark upon the blue and white check of the counterpane. All life, both without and within, was dying life-waning day at the casement, failing fire on the hearth, and in the shadowy bed a man's soul waiting to take wing.