I could show her my house a little way before us.
"Ever go inside the graveyard?" she asked.
Sometimes I do go there, and at that answer she walked nearer to me and spoke eagerly.
"Air all the tombstones standin' up straight, do you know?" she said. "Hev any o' their headstones fell down on 'em?"
This I could answer too, definitely enough; for Friendship Cemetery, by the vigilance of the Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality, is kept in no less scrupulous order than the Friendship parlours.
"Well, that's a relief," she said; "I couldn't get it out o' my head." Then, because she seemed of those on whom silence lays a certain imaginary demand, "My mother an' father an' sister's buried there," she explained. "They're in there. They all died when I was gone. An' I got the notion that their headstones had tipped over on to 'em. Or Aunt Cornie More's, maybe."
Aunt Cornie More. I knew that name, for they had told me about her in Friendship, so that her name, and that of the Oldmoxons, in whose former house I lived, and many others were like folk whom one passes often and remembers. I had been told how Aunt Cornie More had made her own shroud from her crocheted parlour curtains, lest these fall to a later wife of her octogenarian husband; and how as she lay in her coffin the curtain's shell-stitch parrot "come right acrost her chest." This woman beside me had called her "Aunt" Cornie More. And then I remembered the name which Doctor June had spoken on the train and the wheels had measured.
"Delia More!" I said, involuntarily, and regretted it as soon as I had spoken. But, indeed, it was as if some legend woman of the place walked suddenly beside me, like the quick.
Who in Friendship had not heard the name, and who, save one who keeps her own thoughts and forgets to give back greeting, would not on the instant have remembered it? Delia More's stepsister, Jennie Crapwell, had been betrothed to a carpenter of Friendship, and he was at work on their house when, a month before the wedding-day, Delia and that young carpenter had "run away." Who in Friendship could not tell that story? But before I had made an end of murmuring something—
"I might 'a' known they hadn't done talkin' yet," Delia More said bitterly. "They say it was like that when Calliope Marsh's beau run off with somebody else,—for ten years the town et it for cake. Well, they ain't any of 'em goin' to get a look at me. I don't give anybody the chance to show me the cold shoulder. You can tell 'em I was here if you want. They can scare the children with it."