‘Here is the church, and here we have to part for today.  Do we?’

‘Good-bye to you, my lord,’ she said.

He took her hand and dropped the dead thing.

‘Your idea is, to return to Esslemont some day or other?’

‘For the present,’ was her strange answer.

She bowed, she stepped on.  On she sped, leaving him at the stammered beginning of his appeal to her.

Their parting by the graveyard of the church that had united them was what the world would class as curious.  To him it was a further and a well-marked stroke of the fatality pursuing him.  He sauntered by the graveyard wall until her figure slipped out of sight.  It went like a puffed candle, and still it haunted the corner where last seen.  Her vanishing seemed to say, that less of her belonged to him than the phantom his eyes retained behind them somewhere.

There was in his pocket a memento of Ambrose Mallard, that the family had given him at his request.  He felt the lump.  It had an answer for all perplexities.  It had been charged and emptied since it was in his possession; and it could be charged again.  The thing was a volume as big as the world to study.  For the touch of a finger, one could have its entirely satisfying contents, and fly and be a raven of that night wherein poor Ambrose wanders lost, but cured of human wounds.

He leaned on the churchyard wall, having the graves to the front of eyes bent inward.  They were Protestant graves, not so impressive to him as the wreathed and gilt of those under dedication to Feltre’s Madonna.  But whatever they were, they had ceased to nurse an injury or feel the pain for having inflicted it.  Their wrinkles had gone from them, whether of anger or suffering.  Ambrose Mallard lay as peaceful in consecrated ground:  and Chumley Potts would be unlikely to think that the helping to lay Ambrose in his quiet last home would cost him a roasting until priestly intercession availed.  So Chummy continues a Protestant; dull consciences can!  But this is incomprehensible, that she, nursing her injury, should be perfectly civil.  She is a woman without emotion.  She is a woman full of emotion, one man knows.  She ties him to her, to make him feel the lash of his remorse.  He feels it because of her casting him from her—­and so civilly.  If this were a Catholic church, one might go in and give the stained soul free way to get a cleansing.  As it is, here are the graves; the dead everywhere have their sanctity, even the heathen.

Fleetwood read the name of the family of Meek on several boards at the head of the graves.  Jonathan Meek died at the age of ninety-five.  A female Meek had eighty-nine years in this life.  Ezra Meek gave up the ghost prematurely, with a couplet, at eighty-one.  A healthy spot, Croridge, or there were virtues in the Meek family, he reflected, and had a shudder that he did not trace to its cause, beyond an acknowledgement of a desire for the warm smell of incense.