Cloots

Cloots stepped into the chapel for no purpose, in mere idle discernment of color and contrast.

"Mah Soung is dead," repeated Cloots, and an echo ran back and forth between the walls with his word.

Cloots arrived as a confident and more or less truly appreciative observer of all these details.

Cloots had taken the measure of him months before and once for all, he would have said, in his smoky little village.

Yet Cloots saw now with transfixing clarity that he did not know him in the least—could never have known him.