'May I accompany you?'
'If you choose, Captain Colville.'
'And where are they buried?'
'Here,' replied Mary, as she gently opened the gate of the churchyard, and they entered together.
It was an old and sequestered burying-ground—older than the days when Fordoun, the Father of Scottish History, wrote of the district as Fortevioch, a supposed corruption of the Gaelic for distant and remote. Old headstones, spotted with lichens and green with moss, were there half sunk in the ground amid the long rank grass; but the two graves that Mary sought so lovingly, were smoothly turfed and adorned with flowers planted by the hands of herself and Ellinor.
As she knelt to deposit a chaplet at the head of each, Colville read the inscription on the modest tombstone to the memory of Colonel Wellwood, of the Scots Fusiliers, and Ellinor his wife, and Mary, glancing upwards, saw that as he read a soft expression stole into his face, while he hastily, almost surreptitiously, lifted his hat, and then looked more kindly, if possible, at her.
'Well,' thought the girl, 'he is, at least, the best of good fellows to feel this interest in total strangers. It is, I suppose, what poor papa used to call "the Freemasonry of the service."'
Anon came other thoughts that were less pleasing to her. Did real emotion and kindness prompt all this, or was it but a cunning attempt, by an affectation of sympathy and friendly interest, to gain her favour.
But she repelled the suspicion as something unworthy of him and of herself.
Quitting the churchyard in silence, he softly closed the gate, and they continued to walk on slowly a little way together, and Colville was silently recalling Mary's curious legendary story of the funereal light seen by Elspat, the old soldier's widow.