She had taken from the hands of Sabine the task of showing Jean this little corner of his own country, and to-day they had come to see the view from the burial-ground and read the moldering queer old inscriptions on the tombstones. On entering the graveyard they came almost at once to the little corner allotted long ago to immigrants with the name of Pentland—a corner nearly filled now with neat rows of graves. By the side of the latest two, still new and covered with fresh sod, they halted, and she began in silence to separate the flowers she had brought from her mother’s garden into two great bunches.
“This,” she said, pointing to the grave at her feet, “is his. The other grave is Cousin Horace Pentland’s, whom I never saw. He died in Mentone.... He was a first cousin of my grandfather.”
Jean helped her to fill the two vases with water and place the flowers in them. When she had finished she stood up, with a sigh, very straight and slender, saying, “I wish you had known him, Jean. You would have liked him. He was always good-humored and he liked everything in the world ... only he was never strong enough to do much but lie in bed or sit on the terrace in the sun.”
The tears came quietly into her eyes, not at sorrow over the death of her brother, but at the pathos of his poor, weak existence; and Jean, moved by a quick sense of pity, took her hand again and this time kissed it, in the quaint, dignified foreign way he had of doing such things.
They knew each other better now, far better than on the enchanted morning by the edge of the river; and there were times, like this, when to have spoken would have shattered the whole precious spell. There was less of shyness between them than of awe at the thing which had happened to them. At that moment he wanted to keep her forever thus, alone with him, on this high barren hill, to protect her and feel her always there at his side touching his arm gently. Here, in such a place, they would be safe from all the unhappiness and the trouble which in a vague way he knew was inevitably a part of living.
As they walked along the narrow path between the rows of chipped, worn old stones they halted now and then to read some half-faded, crumbling epitaph set forth in the vigorous, Biblical language of the first hardy settlers—sometimes amused, sometimes saddened, by the quaint sentiments. They passed rows of Sutherlands and Featherstones and Canes and Mannerings, all turned to dust long ago, the good New England names of that little corner of the world; and at length they came to a little colony of graves with the name Milford cut into each stone. Here there were no new monuments, for the family had disappeared long ago from the Durham world.
In the midst of these Jean halted suddenly and, bending over one of the stones, said, “Milford ... Milford.... That’s odd. I had a great-grandfather named Milford who came from this part of the country.”
“There used to be a great many Milfords here, but there haven’t been any since I can remember.”
“My great-grandfather was a preacher,” said Jean. “A Congregationalist. He led all his congregation into the Middle West. They founded the town my mother came from.”
For a moment Sybil was silent. “Was his name Josiah Milford?” she asked.