ooked as clean as a Dutch picture.

She noticed on the right, just before she turned up to the village on
the left, the grocer's shop, with the name "Nugent" in capitals as
bright and flamboyant as on the depot of a merchant king. Mr. Nugent
could be faintly descried within, in white shirt-sleeves and an apron,
busied at a pile of cheeses. Overhead, three pairs of lace curtains,
each decked with a blue bow, denoted the bedrooms. One of them must
have been Amy's. She wondered which....

All up the road to the village, some half-mile in length, she pondered
Amy. She had never seen her, to her knowledge; but she had a tolerably
accurate mental picture of her from Mrs. Baxter's account.... Ah! how
could Laurie? How could he...? Laurie, of all people! It was just one
more example....

After dropping her letter into the box at the corner, she hesitated
for an instant. Then, with an odd look on her face, she turned sharply
aside to where the church tower pricked above the leafless trees.

It was a typical little country church, with that odor of the
respectable and rather stuffy sanctity peculiar to the class; she had
wrinkled her nose at it more than once in Laurie's company. But she
passed by the door of it now, and, stepping among the wet grasses,
came down the little slope among the headstones to where a very white
marble angel clasped an equally white marble cross. She passed to the
front of this, and looked, frowning a little over the intolerable
taste of the thing.

The cross, she perceived, was wreathed with a spray of white marble
ivory; the angel was a German female, with a very rounded leg emerging
behind a kind of button; and there, at the foot of the cross, was the
inscription, in startling black--

AMY NUGENT

THE DEAR AND ONLY DAUGHTER

OF

AMOS AND MARIA NUGENT

OF STANTONS

DIED SEPTEMBER 21st 1901

RESPECTED BY ALL

_"I SHALL SEE HER BUT NOT NOW."_

Below, as vivid as the inscription, there stood out the maker's name,
and of the town where he lived.

* * * * *

So she lay there, reflected Maggie. It had ended in that. A mound of
earth, cracking a little, and sunken. She lay there, her nervous
fingers motionless and her stammer silent. And could there be a more
eloquent monument of what she was...? Then she remembered herself, and
signed herself with the cross, while her lips moved an