his tomb under any circumstances. There was
nothing horrible in this churchyard, in the shape of tight mounds bonded
with sticks, which shout imprisonment in the ears rather than whisper
rest; or trim garden-flowers, which only raise images of people in new
black crape and white handkerchiefs coming to tend them; or wheel-marks,
which remind us of hearses and mourning coaches; or cypress-bushes,
which make a parade of sorrow; or coffin-boards and bones lying behind
trees, showing that we are only leaseholders of our graves. No; nothing
but long, wild, untutored grass, diversifying the forms of the mounds
it covered,--themselves irregularly shaped, with no eye to effect; the
impressive presence of the old mountain that all this was a part of
being nowhere excluded by disguising art. Outside were similar slopes
and similar grass; and then the serene impassive sea, visible to a
width of half the horizon, and meeting the eye with the effect of a
vast concave, like the interior of a blue vessel. Detached rocks stood
upright afar, a collar of foam girding their bases, and repeating in its
whiteness the plumage of a countless multitude of gulls that restlessly
hovered about.

'Now, Worm!' said Mr. Swancourt sharply; and Worm started into an
attitude of attention at once to receive orders. Stephen and himself
were then left in possession, and the work went on till early in the
afternoon, when dinner was announced by Unity of the vicarage kitchen
running up the hill without a bonnet.

Elfride did not make her appearance inside the building till late in
the afternoon, and came then by special invitation from Stephen during
dinner. She looked so intensely LIVING and full of movement as she came
into the old silent place, that young Smith's world began to be lit
by 'the purple light' in all its definiteness. Worm was got rid of by
sending him to measure the height of the tower.

What could she do but come close--so close that a minute arc of her
skirt touched his foot--and asked him how he was getting on with
his sketches, and set herself to learn the principles of practical
mensuration as applied to irregular buildings? Then she must ascend the
pulpit to re-imagine for the hundredth time how it would seem to be a
preacher.

Presently she leant over the front of the pulpit.

'Don't you tell papa, will you, Mr. Smith, if I tell you something?' she
said with a sudden impulse to make a confidence.

'Oh no, that I won't,' sai