nxious to avoid, and as having
saddled me with a very heavy responsibility. Still it was impossible for
me to escape, and I could only let things take their course.

Miss Pontifex had expressed a wish to be buried at Paleham; in the course
of the next few days I therefore took the body thither. I had not been
to Paleham since the death of my father some six years earlier. I had
often wished to go there, but had shrunk from doing so though my sister
had been two or three times. I could not bear to see the house which had
been my home for so many years of my life in the hands of strangers; to
ring ceremoniously at a bell which I had never yet pulled except as a boy
in jest; to feel that I had nothing to do with a garden in which I had in
childhood gathered so many a nosegay, and which had seemed my own for
many years after I had reached man's estate; to see the rooms bereft of
every familiar feature, and made so unfamiliar in spite of their
familiarity. Had there been any sufficient reason, I should have taken
these things as a matter of course, and should no doubt have found them
much worse in anticipation than in reality, but as there had been no
special reason why I should go to Paleham I had hitherto avoided doing
so. Now, however, my going was a necessity, and I confess I never felt
more subdued than I did on arriving there with the dead playmate of my
childhood.

I found the village more changed than I had expected. The railway had
come there, and a brand new yellow brick station was on the site of old
Mr and Mrs Pontifex's cottage. Nothing but the carpenter's shop was now
standing. I saw many faces I knew, but even in six years they seemed to
have grown wonderfully older. Some of the very old were dead, and the
old were getting very old in their stead. I felt like the changeling in
the fairy story who came back after a seven years' sleep. Everyone
seemed glad to see me, though I had never given them particular cause to
be so, and everyone who remembered old Mr and Mrs Pontifex spoke warmly
of them and were pleased at their granddaughter's wishing to be laid near
them. Entering the churchyard and standing in the twilight of a gusty
cloudy evening on the spot close beside old Mrs Pontifex's grave which I
had chosen for Alethea's, I thought of the many times that she, who would
lie there henceforth, and I, who must surely lie one day in some such
another place though when and where I knew not, had romped