Lewis Hall was too respectful to tell the old lady what he thought of such selfish advice; he merely did not act upon it. Instead, he went on giving a great deal of thought to Athalia’s “feelings.” That was why he and she were climbing the hill in the dewy silence of this August morning. Athalia had “felt” that she wanted to see the view—though it would have been better for her to have rested in the station, Lewis thought;—(“I ought to have coaxed her out of it,” he reproached himself.) It certainly was a hard walk, considering that it followed a broken night in the sleeping-car. They had left the train at five o’clock in the morning, and were sitting in the station awaiting the express when Athalia had had this impulse to climb the hill. “It looks pretty steep,” Lewis objected; and she flung out her hands with an impatient gesture.
“I love to climb!” she said. So here they were, almost at the top, panting and toiling, Athalia’s skirts wet with dew, and Lewis’s face drawn with fatigue.
“Look!” she said; “it’s all open! We can sit down and see all over the world!” She left the road, springing lightly through the fringing bay and briers toward an open space on the hillside. “There is a gate in the wall!” she called out; “it seems to be some sort of enclosure. Lewis, help me to open the gate! Hurry! What a queer place! What do you suppose it is?”
The gate opened into a little field bounded by a stone wall; the grass had been lately mowed, and the stubble, glistening with dew, showed the curving swaths of the scythe; across it, in even lines from wall to wall, were rows of small stakes painted black. Here and there were faint depressions, low, green cradles in the grass; each depression was marked at the head and foot by these iron stakes, hardly higher than the stubble itself.
“Shakers’ graveyard, I guess,” Lewis said; “I’ve heard that they don’t use gravestones. Peaceful place, isn’t it?”
Her vivid face was instantly grave. “Very peaceful! Oh,” she added, as they sat down in the shadow of a pine, “don’t you sometimes want to lie down and sleep—deep down in the grass and flowers?”
“Well,” he confessed, “I don’t believe it would be as interesting as walking round on top of them.”
She looked at him in despair.
“Come, now,” he defended himself, “you don’t take much to peace yourself at home.”
“You don’t understand!” she said, passionately.