your own future habitation; perhaps your eye will mark the identical
spot where the body you love must lie through all seasons and
weathers, through the slow centuries that will flit so fast for you,
till the crash of doom. It is good that you should think of that,
although it makes you shudder. The English churchyard takes the place
of the Egyptian mummy at the feast, or the slave in the Roman
conqueror's car--it mocks your vigour, and whispers of the end of
beauty and strength.

Probably you need some such reminder. But if, giving to the inevitable
the sigh that is its due, you pursue the vein of thought, it may
further occur to you that the plot before you is in a sense a summary
of the aspirations of humanity. It marks the realization of human
hopes, it is the crown of human ambitions, the grave of human
failures. Here, too, is the end of the man, and here the birthplace of
the angel or the demon. It is his sure inheritance, one that he never
solicits and never squanders; and, last, it is the only certain
resting-place of sleepless, tired mortality.

Here it was that they brought Hilda, and the old squire, and laid them
side by side against the coffin of yeoman Caresfoot, whose fancy it
had been to be buried in stone, and then, piling primroses and
blackthorn blooms upon their graves, left them to their chilly sleep.
Farewell to them, they have passed to where as yet we may not follow.
Violent old man and proud and lovely woman, rest in peace, if peace be
the portion of you both!

To return to the living. The news of the sudden decease of old Mr.
Caresfoot; of the discovery of Philip's secret marriage and the death
of his wife; of the terms of the old man's will, under which, Hilda