me had walked in these fields, and lived in
yonder Castle, and looked upon the familiar swell of yonder ground and
the silver flash of yonder river, and now their ashes were gathered
here and all the forgotten turmoil of their lives was lost in the
silence of those narrow tombs.

Ida loved the spot, hallowed to her not only by the altar of her
faith, but also by the human associations that clung around and
clothed it as the ivy clothed its walls. Here she had been christened,
and here among her ancestors she hoped to be buried also. Here as a
girl, when the full moon was up, she had crept in awed silence with
her brother James to look through the window at the white and solemn
figures stretched within. Here, too, she had sat on Sunday after
Sunday for more than twenty years, and stared at the quaint Latin
inscriptions cut on marble slabs, recording the almost superhuman
virtues of departed de la Molles of the eighteenth century, her own
immediate ancestors. The place was familiar to her whole life; she had
scarcely a recollection with which it was not in some way connected.
It was not wonderful, therefore, that she loved it, and that in the
trouble of her mind her feet shaped their course towards it.

Presently she was in the churchyard. Taking her stand under the
shelter of a line of Scotch firs, through which the gale sobbed and
sang, she leant against a side gate and looked. The scene was desolate
enough. Rain dropped from the roof on to the sodden graves beneath,
and ran in thin sheets down the flint facing of the tower; the dead
leaves whirled and rattled about the empty porch, and over all shot
one red and angry arrow from the sinking sun. She stood in the storm
and rain, gazing at the old church that had seen the end of so many
sorrows more bitter than her own, and the wreck of so many summers,
till the darkness began to close round her like a pall, while the wind
sung the requiem of her hopes. Ida was not of a desponding or
pessimistic character, but in that bitter hour she found it in her
heart, as most people have at one time or another in their lives, to
wish the tragedy over and the curtain down, and that she lay beneath
those dripping sods without sight or hearing, without hope or dread.
It seemed to her that the Hereafter must indeed be terrible if it
outweighs the sorrows of the Here.

And then, poor woman, she thought of the long years between her and
rest, and leaning her head against the gate-post,