of the uncovering, through these careless means, of an old path.  Simultaneously there reached his ears the scraping of metal implements in the soft soil, the dull thud of earth falling regularly.  He paused, listening.  The labour of the men was given an uncouth rhythm by their grunting expulsions of breath.  Otherwise the nature of their industry and its surroundings had imposed upon them a silence, in itself beast-like and unnatural.

At last a harsh voice came to Bobby.  Its brevity pointed the previous dumbness of the speaker: 

“Deep enough!”

And Bobby turned and hurried back along the roughly restored path, as if fleeing from an immaterial thing suddenly quickened with the power of accusation.

He could picture the fresh oblong excavation in the soil of the family burial ground.  He could see where the men had had to tear bushes from among the graves in order to insert their tools.  There was an ironical justice in the condition of the old cemetery.  It had received no interment since the death of Katherine’s father.  Like everything about the Cedars, Silas Blackburn had delivered it to the swift, obliterating fingers of time.  If the old man in his selfishness had paused to gaze beyond the inevitable fact of death, Bobby reflected, he would have guarded with a more precious interest the drapings of his final sleep.

This necessary task on which Bobby had stumbled had made the thicket less congenial than the house.  As he walked back he forecasted with a keen apprehension his approaching ordeal.  It would, doubtless, be more difficult to endure than Howells’s experiment over Silas Blackburn’s body in the old room.  Could he witness the definite imprisonment of his grandfather in a narrow box; could he watch the covering earth fall noisily in that bleak place of silence without displaying for Robinson the guilt that impressed him more and more?

A strange man appeared, walking from the direction of the house.  His black clothing, relieved only by narrow edges of white cuffs between the sleeves and the heavy mourning gloves, fitted with solemn harmony into the landscape and Bobby’s mood.  Such a figure was appropriate to the Cedars.  Bobby stepped to one side, placing a screen of dead foliage between himself and the man whose profession it was to mourn.  He emerged from the forest and saw again the leisurely weaving of the smoke shroud above the house.  Then his eyes were drawn by the restless movements of a pair of horses, standing in the shafts of a black wagon at the court entrance, and his ordeal became like a vast morass which offers no likely path yet whose crossing is the price of salvation.

He was glad to see Graham leave the court and hurry toward him.

“I was coming to hunt you up, Bobby.  The minister’s arrived.  So has Doctor Groom.  Everything’s about ready.”

“Doctor Groom?”

“Yes.  He used to see a good deal of your grandfather.  It’s natural enough he should be here.”