He put out his hand instinctively, but withdrew it empty.
“No, no,” he said; “it’s no marner o’ good.”
“Try.”
“I’d rather not. Good-marning to ye,” and he turned his back on me and walked straight off, with his shoulders hunched up to his ears.
I watched his going moodily, but with no great surprise. It was small matter for wonder that Modred’s death should have roused uncanny suspicions among the ignorant and superstitious who knew of us. The mystery that overhung our whole manner of life was sufficient to account for that.
For long after the sexton had resumed his work—so long, indeed, that when I rose to go, only his head and shoulders bobbed up and down above the rim of the pit he was digging—I sat on the grass beside that poor sterile mound and sought inspiration of it.
But no voice spoke to me from its depths.
CHAPTER XXXV.
ONE SAD VISITOR.
The autumn of that year broke upon us with sobbing winds and wild, wet gusts of tempest laden with flying leaves. In the choked trenches, drowned grasses swayed and swung like torn skirt fringes of the meadows; in the woods, drenched leaves clung together and talked, through the lulls, of the devastation that was wrecking their aftermath of glory.
It had been blowing in soft, irresistible onrushes all one dank October day, and all day had I spent in the high woods that crown the gentle hills three or four miles to the southwest of the city. The air in the long, quiet glades was mystic with the smell of decay; the heels of vanishing forms seemed to twinkle from tangled bends of undergrowth as I approached them. Then often, in going by a spot I could have thought lately tenanted, a sense would tingle through me as of something listening behind some aged trunk that stood back from my path.