“I must say he is rather a polite young man,” admitted Miss Sallie, “if he is somewhat rapid in his movements.”
“He is curiously good-looking,” reflected Ruth. “Not exactly our kind, I should say; but, after all, he may be just foreign and different. Just because he is not an American type doesn’t keep him from being nice.”
All the time the foliage was getting more impenetrable. Tall trees reared themselves on either side of the road, seeming vanguards of the forests behind them. A cool, woodsy breeze touched their cheeks softly, and Barbara closed her eyes for a moment that she might feel the enchantment of the place.
“How many Dutch burghers and their wives must have driven up this same grassy road,” she was thinking to herself. “How many wedding parties and funeral trains, too, for here is their graveyard. No wonder a traveler imagined he saw ghosts on this lonely road, with nothing but a cemetery and an old church to cheer him on his way. And here is our auto running in the very same ruts their funny old carriages and rockaways must have made, and this stranger in front of us on something queerer still. I wonder if ghosts of the future will ride in phantom autos or on motor cycles. What a fearful sight! A headless man on an infernal machine——”
Her reflections were interrupted by the turning around of the automobile. Ruth had evidently decided to go back by the way they had come. Opening her eyes she saw before her a quaint and charming old church set in the midst of a rambling graveyard.
There also stood the black cyclist, like a gruesome sentinel among the tombs. He lifted his cap as they drew up, and, after hesitating a moment, came forward to open the door and help Miss Sallie alight.
“Permit me, Madam,” he said, with such grace of demeanor that the lady thanked him almost with effusion. Grace and Mollie were assisted as if they had been princesses of the blood, as they described it later, while the other two girls leaped to the ground before he had time to make any overtures in their direction.
There was rather an awkward pause, for a moment, as the stranger, with uncovered head, stood aside to let them pass. The silence was not broken and Miss Stuart chose to let it remain so.
“One cannot be too careful,” she had always said, “of chance acquaintances, especially men.” However, she was predisposed in favor of the cyclist, whose manners were exceptional.
The girls were strolling about among the graves, examining the stones with their quaint epitaphs, while the stranger leaned against a tree and lit a cigarette.