All these thoughts, vivid as lightning, and as rapid, darted through poor Fortune's brain during the few moments that she stood with her hand on David's shoulder, while he drew from his magpie's nest a heterogeneous mass of rubbish—pebbles, snail shells, bits of glass and china, fragments even of broken toys.
"Just look there. What ghosts of my childhood, as people would say! Dead and buried, though." And he laughed merrily—he in the full tide and glory of his youth.
Fortune Williams looked down on his happy face. This lad that really loved her would not have hurt her for the world, and her determination was made. He should never know any thing. Nobody should ever know any thing. The "dead and buried" of fifteen years ago must be dead and buried forever.
"David," she said, "just out of curiosity, put your hand down to the very bottom of that hole, and see if you can fish up the mysterious letter."
Then she waited, just as one would wait at the edge of some long-closed grave to see if the dead could possibly be claimed as our dead, even if but a handful of unhonored bones.
No, it was not possible. Nobody could expect it after such a lapse of time. Something David pulled out—it might be paper, it might be rags. It was too dry to be moss or earth, but no one could have recognized it as a letter.
"Give it me," said Miss Williams, holding out her hand.
David put the little heap of "rubbish" therein. She regarded it a moment, and then scattered it on the gravel—"dust to dust," as we say in our funeral service. But she said nothing.
At the moment the young people they were waiting for came, to the other side of the gate, clubs in hand. David and the two Miss Moseleys had by this time become perfectly mad for golf, as is the fashion of the place. The proceeded across the Links, Miss Williams accompanying them, as in duty bound. But she said she was "rather tired," and leaving them in charge of another chaperon—if chaperons are ever wanted or needed in those merry Links of St. Andrews—came home alone.