Ida loved the spot, hallowed to her not only by the altar of her faith, but also by the human associations that clung around and clothed it as the ivy clothed its walls.  Here she had been christened, and here among her ancestors she hoped to be buried also.  Here as a girl, when the full moon was up, she had crept in awed silence with her brother James to look through the window at the white and solemn figures stretched within.  Here, too, she had sat on Sunday after Sunday for more than twenty years, and stared at the quaint Latin inscriptions cut on marble slabs, recording the almost superhuman virtues of departed de la Molles of the eighteenth century, her own immediate ancestors.  The place was familiar to her whole life; she had scarcely a recollection with which it was not in some way connected.  It was not wonderful, therefore, that she loved it, and that in the trouble of her mind her feet shaped their course towards it.

Presently she was in the churchyard.  Taking her stand under the shelter of a line of Scotch firs, through which the gale sobbed and sang, she leant against a side gate and looked.  The scene was desolate enough.  Rain dropped from the roof on to the sodden graves beneath, and ran in thin sheets down the flint facing of the tower; the dead leaves whirled and rattled about the empty porch, and over all shot one red and angry arrow from the sinking sun.  She stood in the storm and rain, gazing at the old church that had seen the end of so many sorrows more bitter than her own, and the wreck of so many summers, till the darkness began to close round her like a pall, while the wind sung the requiem of her hopes.  Ida was not of a desponding or pessimistic character, but in that bitter hour she found it in her heart, as most people have at one time or another in their lives, to wish the tragedy over and the curtain down, and that she lay beneath those dripping sods without sight or hearing, without hope or dread.  It seemed to her that the Hereafter must indeed be terrible if it outweighs the sorrows of the Here.

And then, poor woman, she thought of the long years between her and rest, and leaning her head against the gate-post, began to cry bitterly in the gloom.

Presently she ceased crying and with a start looked up, feeling that she was no longer alone.  Her instincts had not deceived her, for in the shadow of the fir trees, not more than two paces from her, was the figure of a man.  Just then he took a step to the left, which brought his outline against the sky, and Ida’s heart stood still, for now she knew him.  It was Harold Quaritch, the man over whose loss she had been weeping.

“It’s very odd,” she heard him say, for she was to leeward of him, “but I could have sworn that I heard somebody sobbing; I suppose it was the wind.”

Ida’s first idea was flight, and she made a movement for that purpose, but in doing so tripped over a stick and nearly fell.