"Haven't I convinced you that I don't need to think that over any more?" she said, with a look and a blush that expressed so much that the conversation was near to being abruptly ended.
Austin controlled himself, however, and merely said:
"I'm going down to our little cemetery this afternoon to put it in good order for the spring; I know you've always said you didn't want to go there, but perhaps you'll feel differently now. All the Grays are buried there, and no one else, and in spite of all the other things we've neglected, we've kept that as it should be kept; and it's so peaceful and pretty—always shady in summer, when it's hot, and sheltered in winter, when it's cold! I thought you could take a blanket and a book, and sit and read while I worked. Afterwards we can walk over to your house if you like—you may want to give me some final directions about the work that's to be done there while you're gone."
"I'd love to go to the cemetery—or anywhere else, for that matter—with you," said Sylvia, "and afterwards—to our house. Perhaps you'll want to give some directions yourself!"
The tiny graveyard lay in the hollow of one of the wooded slopes which broke the great, undulating meadow which stretched from the Homestead to the river, a wall made of the stones picked up on the place around it, a plain granite shaft erected by the first Gray in the centre, and grouped about the shaft the quaint tablets of the century before, with old-fashioned names spelled in an old-fashioned manner, and with homely rhymes and trite sayings underneath; farther off, the newer gravestones, more ornate and less appealing. The elms were just beginning to bud, and the cold April wind whistled through them, but the pines were as green and sheltering as always, and Sylvia spread her blanket under one of them, and worked away at the sewing she had brought instead of a book, while Austin burned the grass and dug and pruned, whistling under his breath all the time. He stopped once to call her attention to a robin, the first they had seen that spring, and finally, when the sacred little place was in perfect order, came with a handful of trailing arbutus for her, and sat down beside her.
"I thought I remembered seeing some of this on the bank," he said; "it's always grown there—will you take it for your 'bouquet des fiançailles,' Sylvia? I remember how surprised we all were last year because you liked the little wild flowers best, and went around searching for them, when your rooms were full of carnations and hothouse roses. And because you used to go out to walk, just to see the sunsets. Do you still love sunsets, too?"
"Yes, more than ever. In the fall while you were gone, I used to go down to the river nearly every afternoon, and watch the color spread over the fields. There's something about a sunset in the late autumn that's unlike those at any other time of year—have you ever noticed? It's not rosy, but a deep, deep golden yellow—spreading over the dull, bare earth like the glory from the diadem of a saint—one of those gray Fathers of early Italy, for instance."
"I know what you mean—but they seem to me more like the glory that comes into any dull, bare life," said Austin,—"the kind of glory you've been to me. It worries me to hear you say you want to go away to 'think things over.' What is there to think over—if you're sure you care?"
"There are lots of details to a thing of this sort."
"A thing of what sort?"