“Oh, I don’t claim it exclusively,” March protested.

“Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road.  He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on his course, and coming back to where he started.”

Stoller said, “I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here, that they will come to America and set up, if they can’t stand the duties.”

“Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway,” March consented.

If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer.  He followed with his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of the ruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin, upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot.  The land fell away from the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fields and in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into the distance.  “I don’t suppose,” Burnamy said, “that life ever does much better than this, do you?  I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and saying ‘Unberufen.’  I might knock on your bouquet; that’s wood.”

“It would spoil the flowers,” she said, looking down at them in her belt.  She looked up and their eyes met.

“I wonder,” he said, presently, “what makes us always have a feeling of dread when we are happy?”

“Do you have that, too?” she asked.

“Yes.  Perhaps it’s because we know that change must come, and it must be for the worse.”

“That must be it.  I never thought of it before, though.”

“If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological weather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tears beforehand—­it may come to that.”

“I hope it won’t.  I’d rather not know when I was to be happy; it would spoil the pleasure; and wouldn’t be any compensation when it was the other way.”

A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller looking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquiline profile into relief.  “Oh!  Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?” he called gayly up to him.

“I guess we’ve seen about all there is,” he answered.  “Hadn’t we better be going?” He probably did not mean to be mandatory.

“All right,” said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe again without further notice of him.

They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the weird sacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and to account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt, and this one built only a few years before.  Then he locked the doors after them, and ran forward to open against their coming the chapel of the village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortified themselves for it at the village cafe.