The day was cloudless and sunless; one of those days that so often instil a sentiment of melancholy into the heart of an English summer.
“You come here too often, Miss Mordaunt,” said Kenelm, very softly, as he approached.
Lily turned her face to him, without any start of surprise, with no brightening change in its pensive expression,—an expression rare to the mobile play of her features.
“Not too often. I promised to come as often as I could; and, as I told you before, I have never broken a promise yet.”
Kenelm made no answer. Presently the girl turned from the spot, and Kenelm followed her silently till she halted before the old tombstone with its effaced inscription.
“See,” she said, with a faint smile, “I have put fresh flowers there. Since the day we met in this churchyard, I have thought so much of that tomb, so neglected, so forgotten, and—” she paused a moment, and went on abruptly, “do you not often find that you are much too—what is the word? ah! too egotistical, considering and pondering and dreaming greatly too much about yourself?”
“Yes, you are right there; though, till you so accused me, my conscience did not detect it.”
“And don’t you find that you escape from being so haunted by the thought of yourself, when you think of the dead? they can never have any share in your existence here. When you say, ‘I shall do this or that to-day;’ when you dream, ‘I may be this or that to-morrow,’ you are thinking and dreaming, all by yourself, for yourself. But you are out of yourself, beyond yourself, when you think and dream of the dead, who can have nothing to do with your to-day or your to-morrow.”
As we all know, Kenelm Chillingly made it one of the rules of his life never to be taken by surprise. But when the speech I have written down came from the lips of that tamer of butterflies, he was so startled that all it occurred to him to say, after a long pause, was,—
“The dead are the past; and with the past rests all in the present or the future that can take us out of our natural selves. The past decides our present. By the past we divine our future. History, poetry, science, the welfare of states, the advancement of individuals, are all connected with tombstones of which inscriptions are effaced. You are right to honour the mouldered tombstones with fresh flowers. It is only in the companionship of the dead that one ceases to be an egotist.”