across it all by yourself and"--dropping his voice to a hollow whisper--
"_touch--ten--tombstones!_"

Now, if Richard hadn't dropped his voice in that scary way when he said,
"and touch ten tombstones," it would have been no test at all of
Georgina's courage. Strange, how just his way of saying those four words
suddenly made the act such a fearsome one.

"Do it right now," he suggested.

"But it isn't night yet," she answered, "let alone being mid-night."

"No, but it's clouding up, and the sun's down. By the time we'd get to a
graveyard it would be dark enough for me to tell if you're game."

Up to this time Georgina had never gone anywhere without permission. But
this was something one couldn't explain very well at home. It seemed
better to do it first and explain afterward.

Fifteen minutes later, two children and a dog arrived hot and panting at
the entrance to the old burying ground. On a high sand dune, covered with
thin patches of beach and poverty grass, and a sparse growth of scraggly
pines, it was a desolate spot at any time, and now doubly so in the
gathering twilight. The lichen-covered slabs that marked the graves of
the early settlers leaned this way and that along the hill.

The gate was locked, but Georgina found a place where the palings were
loose, and squeezed through, leaving Richard and the dog outside. They
watched her through the fence as she toiled up the steep hill. The sand
was so deep that she plunged in over her shoe-tops at every step. Once on