e one over
there were saying something.

"You live here in Friendship?" the girl demanded abruptly.

I could show her my house a little way before us.

"Ever go inside the graveyard?" she asked.

Sometimes I do go there, and at that answer she walked nearer to me and
spoke eagerly.

"Air all the tombstones standin' up straight, do you know?" she said.
"Hev any o' their headstones fell down on 'em?"

This I could answer too, definitely enough; for Friendship Cemetery, by
the vigilance of the Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality, is
kept in no less scrupulous order than the Friendship parlours.

"Well, that's a relief," she said; "I couldn't get it out o' my head."
Then, because she seemed of those on whom silence lays a certain
imaginary demand, "My mother an' father an' sister's buried there," she
explained. "They're in there. They all died when I was gone. An' I got
the notion that their headstones had tipped over on to 'em. Or Aunt
Cornie More's, maybe."

Aunt Cornie More. I knew that name, for they had told me about her in
Friendship, so that her name, and that of the Oldmoxons, in whose former
house I lived, and many others were like folk whom one passes often and
remembers. I had been told how Aunt Cornie More had made her own shroud
from her crocheted parlour curtains, lest these fall to a later wife of
her octogenarian husband; and how as she lay in her coffin the curtain's
shell-stitch parrot "come right acrost her chest." This woman beside me
had called her "Aunt" Cornie More. And then I remembered the name which
Doctor June had spoken on the train and the wheels had measured.

"Delia More!" I said, involuntarily, and regretted it as soon as I had
spoken. But, indeed, it was as if some legend woman of the place walked
suddenly beside me, like the quick.

Who in Friendship had not heard the name, and who, save one who keeps
her own thoughts and forgets to give back greeting, would not on the
instant have remembered it? Delia More's stepsister, Jennie Crapwell,
had been betrothed to a carpenter of Friendship, and he was at work on
their house when, a month before the wedding-day, Delia and that young
carpenter had "run away." Who in Friendship could not tell that story?
But before I had made an end of murmuring something--

"I might 'a' known they hadn't done talkin' yet," Delia More said
bitterly. "They say it was like that when Calliope Marsh's beau run off
with somebody else,--for ten yea