refreshingly still. The silence in which it lay seemed as keen
and mellow as the light--the pale, almost heatless, sunlight that
filled the air. Here and there robins sang across the stones,
elvishly shrill in the quiet of harvest. The only other living
creature there seemed to Lawford to be his own rather fair, not
insubstantial, rather languid self, who at the noise of the birds
had raised his head and glanced as if between content and
incredulity across his still and solitary surroundings. An
increasing inclination for such lonely ramblings, together with
the feeling that his continued ill-health had grown a little
irksome to his wife, and that now that he was really better she
would be relieved at his absence, had induced him to wander on
from home without much considering where the quiet lanes were
leading him. And in spite of a peculiar melancholy that had
welled up into his mind during these last few days, he had
certainly smiled with a faint sense of the irony of things on
lifting his eyes in an unusually depressed moodiness to find
himself looking down on the shadows and peace of Widderstone.

With that anxious irresolution which illness so often brings in
its train he had hesitated for a few minutes before actually
entering the graveyard. But once safely within he had begun to
feel extremely loth to think of turning back again, and this not
the less at remembering with a real foreboding that it was now
drawing towards evening, that another day was nearly done. He
trailed his umbrella behind him over the grass-grown paths;
staying here and there to read some time-worn inscription;
stooping a little broodingly over the dark green graves. Not for
the first time during the long laborious convalescence that had
followed apparently so slight an indisposition, a fleeting sense