"Now, mummy," he laughed. "You speak as if you wore trousers."
"Why, dear boy?"
"Because that remark is almost too apt to come from any one in petticoats."
Grandmamma thought this an abominable insinuation, and passing on to speak of Hertha, she expressed her fear that the way in which he treated her was not the right one, that it had evidently damped her, and might alienate her from him altogether.
He was going to make some reply, but at that moment they came within the sacred boundary which surrounded the small unpretending village churchyard, where, under the shadow of the primeval limes, the Sellenthins for centuries had found their last resting-place. A row of ivy-covered mounds, each enclosed in its simple iron railings, ran along under the whitewashed church wall, only divided from it by a narrow gravel path. There was a soft rustling in the boughs of the limes, and the deep tones of the organ, subdued and indistinct, coming through the high round window, fell on Leo's ear.
Involuntarily he stood still and folded his hands.
His mother, who divined his feelings, withdrew her hand quietly from his arm, and fell back a few steps. The girls, who had hurried on, were now out of sight.
He felt his heart swell like a flood within him.
Since he was four years old he had trodden this path. Within the whitewashed fence, at the gate of which the village swains gathered, and where, as of old, the bread-woman with her basket of loaves, and the old soldier with the wooden-leg and forage-cap, crouched on the cobble-stones, he had been used to shake off the week-day dust and cobwebs that clogged his soul. The high spirits and troubles of the schoolboy; the youth's defiance, and war of the senses; the grown man's household cares and imperiousness; aye, and that wild sweet mysterious something which now was done with for ever,--all these had been left behind him as he entered the churchyard gates. The graves of his ancestors had ever sent a pure, soothing thrill through his being, so that he had come into God's House as one absolved and purified. And yet the feeling of holy reverence which awoke in him now was not comparable with anything that had ever before appealed to his careless heart with exhortation and blessing. He asked himself, in astonishment, how he could all these years have borne so carelessly the terrible dead weight on his mind, without doing violence to the world or going mad. Only now, when the burden had dropped off, did he know what he had been dragging about with him, and a sense of unutterable blissful relief took possession of him at the thought that he might in future hold up his head as a free man.
He caught his mother's hand in his. She had been busying herself with removing weeds from the foot of the railings, but now came and stood beside him before the last grave in the row, the grave of Leo's father.