But the child lay awake for a long time, puzzling her small brain. She was not quite sure what a heart was, but she thought the Rector would miss it, and that he was in some sort of trouble she realized well enough.
'Can people live without hearts?' she asked Lilian next day.
'Of course not,' replied Lilian, with the superior wisdom of nine years old, and dismissed the idea with scorn.
But Peggy did not consider the question ended by any means. Like most children, with the instinctive dread of being laughed at, she never thought of confiding her difficulty to an older person, but solving the problem according to her own quaint ideas, she dodged the vigilance of Ellen, and trotted off alone to the churchyard. The lych-gate was locked, but she toiled over the steep steps that spanned the wall, and wading through the long grass under the yew-trees, found the spot, all covered with flowers, which Lilian had pointed out on Sunday, where 'Mary, the wife of the Reverend Philip Howell,' slept, 'in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life,' and where the stonemason had been already busy with the newly-added line: 'Also Raymond, only son of the above.'
Who can tell all that goes on in the mind of a little child, or what it understands of death? In a vague way Peggy knew that her playfellow had 'gone to heaven, where mother is,' but she did not think of that as any cause for sorrow, nor did she connect him for an instant with the place where she stood, but, with her nurse's words still troubling her, she knelt down and searched among the white flowers that hid the bare earth beneath.
A step on the gravel walk startled her to her feet, but it was only the Rector, coming slowly down the path from the church-door.
'Don't go away, little Margaret,' he said quietly. 'God's acre is free to all. We have both precious seed sown here that we hope to find blooming some day in Paradise.'
'Oh, Mr. Howell,' burst out Peggy, her gray eyes brimming over with tears, 'is it really true that your heart is lost here? Don't you think, if we were both to look, we might find it again?'
The Rector stroked the brown curls with a tender hand.
'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. No, child, it's not here, but up in the light beyond;' and he pointed where the sun, breaking through the clouds, burst out in a flood of golden glory. 'We make our plans for this world,' he said softly, speaking as much to himself as to Peggy, 'and say we will do this or that, but sometimes God takes it out of our hands and arranges it for us; but His ways are better than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts, and, after all, death is but the gate to life immortal.'