"Yes—it is all so hard to know—so hard to think! But I know it is true.... Oh, Phoebe, where do you think I was but now, in my dream?... Yes, where?—What place?... Guess!"
"I cannot tell ... back in the old time?"
"Back in the old time—back in the old place. I was shelling peas to help old Keturah—old Keturah that had had three husbands, and her old husband then was the sexton, and he had buried them all three! We were there, under her porch ... with the honeysuckle all in flower—and, oh, the smell of it in the heat!—it was all there in my dream! And you were there. Oh, Phoebe darling, how beautiful you were! We were seventeen."
"Ah, my dear, I know when that was. 'Twas the day they came—came first. Oh, God be good to us!"
"Oh, Phoebe dear, why be so heartbroken? It was a merry time. Thank God for it with me, darling!... Ay, I know—all over now!..."
"I mind it well, dear. They came up on their horses."
"Thornton and Ralph. And made a pretext they would like to see inside the Church. Because old Keturah had the key."
"But 'twas an untruth! Little care they had for inside the Church! 'Twas ourselves, and they knew it."
"Oh, Phoebe!—but we knew it too! I had no chance to dream how we showed them the Church and the crypt, for I woke up. Ah, but 'tis long ago now!—sixty-two—sixty-three years! I wonder, is the stack of bones in the crypt now that was then? There was a big skull that measured twenty-seven inches."
"That it was! Twenty-seven. Now, to think of us young creatures handling those old bones!"