“Where’s ’t been to, then, these last days?” she enquired. “He died yesterday morning and they be going to bury him on Monday. ’Twill be a monstrous large funeral. Can’t be but you’ve heard tell of Jimmy’s being done for.” She added, in an amazed and bewildered tone.
“I’ve been very busy this last week,” said Luke.
“You didn’t seem very busy this afternoon, when you were with Annie and me up at station-field,” she exclaimed, with a mischievous little laugh. Then in a changed voice, “Let’s go and see where they’re going to put him. It’s somewhere over there, under South Wall.”
They moved cautiously hand in hand between the dark grassy mounds, the heavy dew soaking their shoes.
Suddenly Phyllis stopped, her fingers tightening, and a delicious thrill of excitement quivering through her. “There it is. Look!” she whispered.
They advanced a step or two, and found themselves confronted by a gloomy oblong hole, and an ugly heap of ejected earth.
“Oh, how awful it do look, doesn’t it, Luke darling?” she murmured, clinging closely to him.
He put his arm round the girl’s waist, and together, under the vast dome of the starlit sky, the two warm-blooded youthful creatures contemplated the resting-place of the generations.
“It’s queer to think,” remarked Luke pensively, “that just as we stand looking on this, so, when we’re dead, other people will stand over our graves, and we know nothing and care nothing!”
“They dug this out this morning,” said Phyllis, more concerned with the immediate drama than with general meditations of mortality. “Old Ben Fursling’s son did it, and my father helped him in his dinner-hour. They said another hot day like this would make the earth too hard.”