But what caus’d our joy was to see, along the road, a small cavalcade moving away from us, with many bright glances of light and color, as their steel caps and sashes took the sunshine—a pretty sight, and the prettier because it meant our present deliverance.
The girl beside me gave a cry of delight, then sigh’d; and after a minute began to walk back toward the hut: where I left her, and ran up hill for the basket and ham. On my return, I found her examining a heap of rusty tools that, it seem’d, she had found on a shelf of the building. ’Twas no light help to the good fellowship that afterward united us, that from the first I could read her thoughts often without words; and for this reason, that her eyes were as candid as the noonday.
So now I answer’d her aloud—
“This afternoon we may venture down to the plain, where no doubt we shall find a clergyman to sell us a patch of holy ground—”
“Holy ground?” She look’d at me awhile and shook her head. “I am not of your religion,” she said.
“And your father?”
“I think no man ever discovered my father’s religion. Perhaps there was none to discover: but he was no bad father” she steadied her voice and went on:—“He would prefer the hillside to your ‘holy ground.’”
So, an hour later, I delv’d his grave in the frosty earth, close by the spot where he lay. Somehow, I shiver’d all the while, and had a cruel shooting pain in my wound that was like to have mastered me before the task was ended. But I managed to lower the body softly into the hole and to cover it reverently from sight: and afterward stood leaning on my spade and feeling very light in the head, while the girl knelt and pray’d for her father’s soul.
And the picture of her as she knelt is the last I remember, till I open’d my eyes, and was amazed to find myself on my back, and staring up at darkness.
“What has happen’d?”