In the summer of 187-, when young Doctor Putnam was recovering from an attack of typhoid fever, he used to take short walks in the suburbs of the little provincial town where he lived. He was still weak enough to need a cane, and had to sit down now and then to rest. His favorite haunt was an old-fashioned cemetery lying at the western edge of the alluvial terrace on which the town is built. The steep hillside abuts boldly on the salt marsh. One of the cemetery-paths runs along the brink of the hill; and here, on a wooden bench under a clump of red cedars, Putnam would sit for hours enjoying the listless mood of convalescence. Where the will remains passive, the mind, like an idle weathercock, turns to every puff of suggestion, and the senses, born new from sickness, have the freshness and delicacy of a child's. It soothed his eye to follow lazily the undulations of the creek, lying like the folds of a blue silk ribbon on the flat ground of the marsh below. He watched the ebbing tide suck down the water from the even lines of trenches that sluiced the meadows till the black mud at their bottom glistened in the sun. The opposite hills were dark with the heavy foliage of July. In the distance a sail or two speckled the flashing waters of the bay, and the lighthouse beyond bounded the southern horizon.

It was a quiet, shady old cemetery, not much disturbed by funerals. Only at rare intervals a fresh heap of earth and a slab of clean marble intruded with their tale of a new and clamorous grief among the sunken mounds and weatherstained tombstones of the ancient sleepers for whom the tears had long been dried. Now and then a mourner came to put flowers on a grave; now and then one of the two or three laborers who kept the walks and shrubberies in order would come along the path by Putnam's bench, trundling a squeaking wheelbarrow; sometimes a nurse with a baby-carriage found her way in. But generally the only sounds to break the quiet were the songs of birds, the rumble of a wagon over the spile bridge across the creek and the whetting of scythes in the water-meadows, where the mowers, in boots up to their waists, went shearing the oozy plain and stacking up the salt hay.

One afternoon Putnam was in his accustomed seat, whistling softly to himself and cutting his initials into the edge of the bench. The air was breathless, and the sunshine lay so hot on the marshes that it seemed to draw up in a visible steam a briny incense which mingled with the spicy smell of the red cedars. Absorbed in reverie, he failed to notice how the scattered clouds that had been passing across the sky all the afternoon were being gradually reinforced by big fluffy cumuli rolling up from the north, until a rumble overhead and the rustle of a shower in the trees aroused him.

In the centre of the grounds was an ancient summer-house standing amidst a maze of flower-beds intersected by gravel-walks. This was the nearest shelter, and, as the rain began to patter smartly, Putnam pocketed his knife, turned up his coat-collar and ran for it. Arrived at the garden-house, he found there a group of three persons, driven to harbor from different parts of the cemetery. The shower increased to a storm, the lattices were lashed by the rain and a steady stream poured from the eaves. The althÆa and snowberry bushes in the flower-pots, and even the stunted box-edges along the paths, swayed in the wind. It grew quite dark in the summer-house, shaded by two or three old hemlocks, and it was only by the lightning-flashes that Putnam could make out the features of the little company of refugees. They stood in the middle of the building, to avoid the sheets of rain blown in at the doors in gusts, huddling around a pump that was raised on a narrow stone platform—not unlike the daughters of Priam clustered about the great altar in the penetralia: PrÆcipites atra ceu tempestate columbÆ.

They consisted of a young girl, an elderly woman with a trowel and watering-pot, and a workman in overalls, who carried a spade and had perhaps been interrupted in digging a grave. The platform around the pump hardly gave standing room for a fourth. Putnam accordingly took his seat on a tool-chest near one of the entrances, and, while the soft spray blew through the lattices over his face and clothes, he watched the effect of the lightning-flashes on the tossing, dripping trees of the cemetery-grounds.

Soon a shout was heard and down one of the gravel-walks, now a miniature river, rushed a Newfoundland dog, followed by a second man in overalls. Both reached shelter soaked and lively. The dog distributed the contents of his fur over our party by the pump, nosed inquiringly about, and then subsided into a corner. Second laborer exchanged a few words with first laborer, and melted into the general silence. The slight flurry caused by their arrival was only momentary, while outside the storm rose higher and inside it grew still darker. Now and then some one said something in a low tone, addressed rather to himself than to the others, and lost in the noise of the thunder and rain.

But in spite of the silence there seemed to grow up out of the situation a feeling of intimacy between the members of the little community in the summer-house. The need of shelter—one of the primitive needs of humanity—had brought them naturally together and shut them up "in a tumultuous privacy of storm." In a few minutes, when the shower should leave off, their paths would again diverge, but for the time being they were inmates and held a household relation to one another.

And so it came to pass that when it began to grow lighter and the rain stopped, and the sun glanced out again on the reeking earth and saturated foliage, conversation grew general.

"Gracious sakes!" said the woman with the trowel and watering-pot as she glanced along the winding canals that led out from the summer-house—"jest see the water in them walks!"

"Gol! 'tis awful!" murmured the Irishman with the spade. "There'll be a fut of water in the grave, and the ould mon to be buried the morning!"

"Ah, they had a right to put off the funeral," said the other workman, "and not be giving the poor corp his death of cold."

"'Tis warrum enough there where the ould mon's gone, but 'tis cold working for a poor lad like mesilf in the bottom of a wet grave. Gol! 'tis like a dreen." With that he shouldered his spade and waded reluctantly away.

Second laborer paused to light his dhudeen, and then disappeared in the opposite direction, his Newfoundland taking quite naturally to the deepest puddles in their course.

"Hath this fellow no feeling of his business?" asked Putnam, rising and sauntering up to the pump. The question was meant more for the younger than the elder of the two women, but the former paid no heed to it, and the latter, by way of answer, merely glanced at him suspiciously and said "H'm!" She was unlocking the tool-chest on which he had been sitting, and now raised the lid, stowed away her trowel and watering-pot, locked the chest again and put the key in her pocket, with the remark, "I guess I hain't got any more use for a sprinkle-pot to-day."

"It is rather de trop," said Putnam.

The old woman looked at him still more distrustfully, and then, drawing up her skirts, showed to his great astonishment a pair of india-rubber boots, in which she stumped away through the water and the mud, leaving in the latter colossal tracks which speedily became as pond-holes in the shallower bed of the stream. The younger woman stood at the door, gathering her dress about her ankles and gazing irresolutely at these frightful vestigia which gauged all too accurately the depth of the mud and the surface-water above it.

"They look like the fossil bird-tracks in the Connecticut Valley sandstone," said Putnam, following the direction of her eyes.

These were very large and black. She turned them slowly on the speaker, a tallish young fellow with a face expressive chiefly of a good-natured audacity and an alertness for whatever in the way of amusement might come within range. Her look rested on him indifferently, and then turned back to the wet gravel.

Putnam studied for a moment the back of her head and her figure, which was girlishly slender and clad in gray. "How extraordinary," he resumed, "that she should happen to have rubber boots on!"

"She keeps them in the tool-chest. The cemetery-man gives her a key," she replied after a pause, and as if reluctantly. Her voice was very low and she had the air of talking to herself.

"Isn't that a rather queer place for a wardrobe? I wonder if she keeps anything else there besides the boots and the trowel and the 'sprinkle-pot'?"

"I believe she has an umbrella and some flower-seeds."

"Now, if she only had a Swedish cooking-box and a patent camp-lounge," said Putnam laughing, "she could keep house here in regular style."

"She spends a great deal of time here: her children are all here, she told me."

"Well, it's an odd taste to live in a burying-ground, but one might do worse perhaps. There's nothing like getting accustomed gradually to what you've got to come to. And then if one must select a cemetery for a residence, this isn't a bad choice. Have you noticed what quaint old ways they have about it? At sunset the sexton rings a big bell that hangs in the arch over the gateway: he told me he had done it every day for twenty years. It's not done, I believe, on the principle of firing a sunset gun, but to let people walking in the grounds know the gate is to be shut. There's a high stone wall, you know, and somebody might get shut in all night. Think of having to spend the night here!"

"I have spent the night here often," she answered, again in an absent voice and as if murmuring to herself.

"You have?" exclaimed Putnam. "Oh, you slept in the tool-chest, I suppose, on the old lady's shake-down."

She was silent, and he began to have a weird suspicion that she had spoken in earnest. "This is getting interesting," he said to himself; and then aloud, "You must have seen queer sights. Of course, when the clock struck twelve all the ghosts popped out and sat on their respective tombstones. The ghosts in this cemetery must be awfully old fellows. It doesn't look as if they had buried any one here for a hundred and thirty-five years. I've often thought it would be a good idea to inscribe Complet over the gate, as they do on a Paris omnibus."

"You speak very lightly of the dead," said the young girl in a tone of displeasure and looking directly at him.

Putnam felt badly snubbed. He was about to attempt an explanation, but her manner indicated that she considered the conversation at an end. She gathered up her skirts and prepared to leave the summer-house. The water had soaked away somewhat into the gravel.

"Excuse me," said Putnam, advancing desperately and touching his hat, "but I notice that your shoes are thin and the ground is still very wet. I'm going right over to High street, and if I can send you a carriage or anything—"

"Thank you, no: I sha'n't need it;" and she stepped off hastily down the walk.

Putnam looked after her till a winding of the path took her out of sight, and then started slowly homeward. "What the deuce could she mean," he pondered as he walked along, "about spending the night in the cemetery? Can she—no she can't—be the gatekeeper's daughter and live in the gate-house? Anyway, she's mighty pretty."

His mother and his maiden aunt, who with himself made up the entire household, received him with small scoldings and twitterings of anxiety. They felt his wet clothes, prophesied a return of his fever and forced him to go immediately to bed, where they administered hot drinks and toast soaked in scalded milk. He lay awake a long time, somewhat fatigued and excited. In his feeble condition and in the monotony which his life had assumed of late the trifling experience of the afternoon took on the full proportions of an adventure. He thought it over again and again, but finally fell asleep and slept soundly. He awoke once, just at dawn, and lay looking through his window at a rosy cloud which reposed upon an infinite depth of sky, motionless as if sculptured against the blue. A light morning wind stirred the curtains and the scent of mignonette floated in from the dewy garden. He had that confused sense of anticipation so common in moments between waking and sleeping, when some new, pleasant thing has happened, or is to happen on the morrow, which the memory is too drowsy to present distinctly. Of this pleasant, indistinct promise that auroral cloud seemed somehow the omen or symbol, and watching it he fell asleep again. When he next awoke the sunlight of mid-forenoon was flooding the chamber, and he heard his mother's voice below stairs as she sat at her sewing.

In the afternoon he started on his customary walk, and his feet led him involuntarily to the cemetery. As he traversed the path along the edge of the hill he saw in one of the grave-lots the heroine of his yesterday's encounter, and a sudden light broke in on him: she was a mourner. And yet how happened it that she wore no black? There was a wooden railing round the enclosure, and within it a single mound and a tombstone of fresh marble. A few cut flowers lay on the grave. She was sitting in a low wicker chair, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes fixed vacantly on the western hills. Putnam now took closer note of her face. It was of a brown paleness. The air of hauteur given it by the purity of the profile and the almost insolent stare of the large black eyes was contradicted by the sweet, irresolute curves of the mouth. At present her look expressed only a profound apathy. As he approached her eyes turned toward him, but seemingly without recognition. Diffidence was not among Tom Putnam's failings: he felt drawn by an unconquerable sympathy and attraction to speak to her, even at the risk of intruding upon the sacredness of her grief.

"Excuse me, miss," he began, stopping in front of her, "but I want to apologize for what I said yesterday about—about the cemetery. It must have seemed very heartless to you, but I didn't know that you were in mourning when I spoke as I did."

"I have forgotten what you said," she answered.

"I am glad you have," said Putnam, rather fatuously. There seemed really nothing further to say, but as he lingered for a moment before turning away a perverse recollection surprised him, and he laughed out loud.

She cast a look of strong indignation at him, and rose to her feet.

"Oh, I ask your pardon a thousand times," he exclaimed reddening violently. "Please don't think that I was laughing at anything to do with you. The fact is that last idiotic speech of mine reminded me of something that happened day before yesterday. I've been sick, and I met a friend on the street who said, 'I'm glad you're better;' and I answered, 'I'm glad that you're glad that I'm better;' and then he said, 'I'm glad that you're glad that I'm glad that you're better'—like the House that Jack Built, you know—and it came over me all of a sudden that the only way to continue our conversation gracefully would be for you to say, 'I'm glad that you're glad that I've forgotten what you said yesterday.'"

She had listened impatiently to this naÏve and somewhat incoherent explanation, and she now said, "I wish you would go away. You see that I am alone here and in trouble. I can't imagine what motive you can have for annoying me in this way," her eyes filling with angry tears.

Putnam was too much pained by the vehemence of her language to attempt any immediate reply. His first impulse was to bow and retire without more words. But a pertinacity which formed one of his strongest though perhaps least amiable traits countermanded his impulse, and he said gravely, "Certainly, I will go at once, but in justice to myself I must first assure you that I didn't mean to intrude upon you or annoy you in any way."

She sank down into her chair and averted her face.

"You say," he continued, "that you are in trouble, and I beg you to believe that I respect your affliction, and that when I spoke to you just now it was simply to ask pardon for having hurt your feelings yesterday, without meaning to, by my light mention of the dead. I've been too near death's door myself lately to joke about it." He paused, but she remained silent. "I'm going away now," he said softly. "Won't you say that you excuse me, and that you haven't any hard feelings toward me?"

"Yes, oh yes," she answered wearily: "I have no feelings. Please go away."

Putnam raised his hat respectfully, and went off down the pathway. On reaching the little gate-house he sat down to rest on a bench before the door. The gatekeeper was standing on the threshold in his shirt-sleeves, smoking a pipe. "A nice day after the rain, sir," he began.

"Yes, it is."

"Have you any folks here, sir?"

"No, no one. But I come here sometimes for a stroll."

"Yes, I've seen you about. Well, it's a nice, quiet place for a walk, but the grounds ain't kep' up quite the shape they used to be: there ain't so much occasion for it. Seems as though the buryin' business was dull, like pretty much everything else now-a-days."

"Yes, that's so," replied Putnam absently.

The gatekeeper spat reflectively upon the centre of the doorstep, and resumed: "There's some that comes here quite reg'lar, but they mostly have folks here. There's old Mrs. Lyon comes very steady, and there's young Miss Pinckney: she's one of the most reg'lar."

"Is that the young lady in gray, with black eyes?"

"That's she."

"Who is she in mourning for?"

"Well, she ain't exactly in mourning. I guess, from what they say, she hain't got the money for black bunnets and dresses, poor gal! But it's her brother that's buried here—last April. He was in the hospital learning the doctor's business when he was took down."

"In the hospital? Was he from the South, do you know?"

"Well, that I can't say: like enough he was."

"Did you say that she is poor?"

"So they was telling me at the funeral. It was a mighty poor funeral too—not more'n a couple of hacks. But you can't tell much from that, with the fashions now-a-days: some of the richest folks buries private like. You don't see no such funerals now as they had ten years back. I've seen fifty kerridges to onst a-comin' in that gate," waving his pipe impressively toward that piece of architecture, "and that was when kerridge-hire was half again as high as it is now. She must have spent a goodly sum in green-house flowers, though: fresh b[=o]quets 'most every day she keeps a-fetchin'."

"Well, good-day," said Putnam, starting off.

"Good-day, sir."

Putnam had himself just completed his studies at the medical college when attacked by fever, and he now recalled somewhat vaguely a student of the name of Pinckney, and remembered to have heard that he was a Southerner. The gatekeeper's story increased the interest which he was beginning to feel in his new acquaintance, and he resolved to follow up his inauspicious beginnings to a better issue. He knew that great delicacy would be needed in making further approaches, and so decided to keep out of her sight for a time. In the course of the next few days he ascertained, by visits to the cemetery and talks with the keeper, that she now seldom visited her brother's grave in the forenoon, although during the first month after his death she had spent all her days and some of her nights beside it.

"I hadn't the heart, sir, to turn her out at sundown, accordin' to the regulations; so I'd leave the gate kinder half on the jar, and she'd slip out when she had a mind to."

Putnam read the inscription on the tombstone, which ran as follows: "To the Memory of Henry Pinckney. Born October 29th, 1852. Died April 27th, 187-;" and under this the text, "If thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him." He noticed with a sudden twinge of pity that the flowers on the grave, though freshly picked every day, were wild-flowers—mostly the common field varieties, with now and then a rarer blossom from wood or swamp, and now and then a garden flower. He gathered from this that the sister's purse was running low, and that she spent her mornings in collecting flowers outside the city. His imagination dwelt tenderly upon her slim, young figure and mourning face passing through far-away fields and along the margins of lonely creeks in search of some new bloom which grudging Nature might yield her for her sorrowful needs. Meanwhile he determined that the shrine of her devotion should not want richer offerings. There was a hot-house on the way from his home to the cemetery, and he now stopped there occasionally of a morning and bought a few roses to lay upon the mound. This continued for a fortnight. He noticed that his offerings were left to wither undisturbed, though the little bunches of field flowers were daily renewed as before.

In spite of the funereal nature of his occupation his spirits in these days were extraordinarily high. His life, so lately escaped from the shadows of death, seemed to enjoy a rejuvenescence and to put forth fresh blossoms in the summer air. As he sat under the cedars and listened to the buzzing of the flies that frequented the shade, the unending sound grew to be an assurance of earthly immortality. His new lease of existence prolonged itself into a fee simple, and even in presence of the monuments of decay his future, filled with bright hazy dreams, melted softly into eternity. But one morning as he approached the little grave-lot with his accustomed offerings he looked up and saw the young girl standing before him. Her eyes were fixed on the flowers in his hand. He colored guiltily and stood still, like a boy caught robbing an orchard. She looked both surprised and embarrassed, but said at once, "If you are the gentleman who has been putting flowers on my brother's grave, I thank you for his sake, but—"

She paused, and he broke in: "I ought to explain, Miss Pinckney, that I have a better right than you think, perhaps, to bring these flowers here: I was a fellow-student with your brother in the medical school."

Her expression changed immediately. "Oh, did you know my brother?" she asked eagerly.

He felt like a wretched hypocrite as he answered, "Yes, I knew him, though not intimately exactly. But I took—I take—a very strong interest in him."

"Every one loved Henry who knew him," she said, "but his class have all been graduated and gone away, and he made few friends, because he was so shy. No one comes near him now but me."

He was silent. She walked to the grave, and he followed, and they stood there without speaking. It did not seem to occur to her to ask why he had not mentioned her brother at their former interview. She was evidently of an unsuspecting nature, or else all other impressions were forgotten and absorbed in the one thought of her bereavement. After a glance at her Putnam ventured to lay his roses reverently upon the mound. She held in her hand a few wild-flowers just gathered. These she kissed, and dropped them also on the grave. He understood the meaning of her gesture and was deeply moved.

"Poor little, dull-colored things!" she said, looking down at them.

"They are a thousand times more beautiful than mine," he exclaimed passionately. "I am ashamed of those heartless affairs: anybody can buy them."

"Oh no: my brother was very fond of roses. Perhaps you remember his taste for them?" she inquired innocently.

"I—I don't think he ever alluded to them. The atmosphere of the medical college was not very Æsthetic, you know."

"At first I used to bring green-house flowers," she continued, without much heeding his answer, "but lately I haven't been able to afford them except on Sundays. Sundays I bring white ones from the green-house."

She had seated herself in her wicker chair, and Putnam, after a moment's hesitation, sat down on the low railing near her. He observed among the wild plants that she had gathered the mottled leaves and waxy blossoms of the pipsissewa and its cousin the shinleaf.

"You have been a long way to get some of those," he said: "that pipsissewa grows in hemlock woods, and the nearest are several miles from here."

"I don't know their names. I found them in a wood where I used to walk sometimes with my brother. He knew all their names. I went there very early this morning, when the dew was on them."

"'Flowers that have on them the cold dews of the night are strewings fittest for graves,'" said Putnam in an undertone.

Her face had assumed its usual absent expression, and she seemed busy with some memory and unconscious of his presence. He recalled the latter to her by rising and saying, "I will bid you good-morning now, but I hope you will let me come and sit here sometimes if it doesn't disturb you. I have been very sick myself lately: I was near dying of the typhoid fever. I think it does me good to come here."

"Did you have the typhoid? My brother died of the typhoid."

"May I come sometimes?"

"You may come if you wish to visit Henry. But please don't bring any more of those expensive flowers. I suppose it is selfish in me, but I can't bear to have any of his friends do more for him than I can."

"I won't bring any more, of course, if it troubles you, and I thank you very much for letting me come. Good-morning, Miss Pinckney." He bowed and walked away.

Putnam availed himself discreetly of the permission given. He came occasionally of an afternoon, and sat for an hour at a time. Usually she said little. Her silence appeared to proceed not from reserve, but from dejection. Sometimes she spoke of her brother. Putnam learned that he had been her only near relative. Their parents had died in her childhood, and she had come North with her brother when he entered the medical school. From something that she once said Putnam inferred that her brother had owned an annuity which died with him, and that she had been left with little or nothing. They had few acquaintances in the North, almost none in the city. An aunt in the South had offered her a home, and she was going there in the fall. She looked forward with dread to the time of her departure.

"It will be so cruel," she said, "to leave my poor boy all alone here among strangers, and I never away from him before."

"Don't think of it now," he answered, "and when you are gone I will come here often and see to everything."

Her bereavement had evidently benumbed all her faculties and left her with a slight hold on life. She had no hopes or wishes for the future. In alluding to her brother she confused her tenses, speaking of him sometimes in the past, and sometimes in the present as of one still alive. Putnam felt that in a girl of her age this mood was too unnatural to last, and he reckoned not unreasonably on the reaction that must come when her youth began again to assert its rights. He was now thoroughly in love, and as he sat watching her beautiful abstracted face he found it hard to keep back some expression of tenderness. Often, too, it was difficult for him to tone down his spirits to the proper pitch of respectful sympathy with her grief. His existence was golden with new-found life and hope: into the shadow that covered hers he could not enter. He could only endeavor to draw her out into the sunshine once more.

One day the two were sitting, as usual, in silence or speaking but rarely. It was a day in the very core of summer, and the life of Nature was at its flood. The shadows of the trees rested so heavy and motionless on the grass that they appeared to sink into it and weigh it down like palpable substances.

"I feel," said Putnam suddenly, "as though I should live for ever."

"Did you ever doubt it?" she asked.

"Oh, I mean here—ici bas—in the body. I can't conceive of death or of a spiritual existence on such a day as this."

"There is nothing here to live for," she said wearily. Presently she added, "This hot glare makes me sick: I wish those men would stop hammering on the bridge. I wish I could die and get away into the dark."

Putnam paused before replying. He had never heard her speak so impatiently. Was the revulsion coming? Was she growing tired of sorrow? After a minute he said, "Ah, you don't know what it is to be a convalescent and lie for months in a darkened room listening to the hand-organ man and the scissors-grinder, and the fellow that goes through the street hallooing 'Cash paid for rags!' It's like having a new body to get the use of your limbs again and come out into the sunshine."

"Were you very sick?" she inquired with some show of interest.

He remembered with some mortification that he had told her so once or twice before. She had apparently forgotten it. "Yes, I nearly died."

"Were you glad to recover?"

"Well, I can't remember that I had any feelings in particular when I first struck the up-track. It was hard work fighting for life, and I don't think I cared much one way or the other. But when I got well enough to sit up it began to grow interesting. I used to sit at the window in a very infantile frame of mind and watch everything that went by. It wasn't a very rowdy life, as the prisoner in solitary confinement said to Dickens. We live in a back street, where there's not much passing. The advent of the baker's cart used to be the chief excitement. It was painted red and yellow, and he baked very nice leaf-cookies. My mother would hang a napkin in the door-knocker when she wanted him to stop; and as I couldn't see the knocker from my window, I used to make bets with Dummy as to whether the wagon would stop or not."

"Your mother is living, then?"

"Yes: my father died when I was a boy."

She asked no further questions, but a few minutes after rose and said, "I think I will go now. Good-evening."

He had never before outstayed her. He looked at his watch and found that it was only half-past four.

"I hope," he began anxiously, "that you are not feeling sick: you spoke just now of being oppressed by the heat. Excuse me for staying so long."

"Oh no," she answered, "I'm not sick. I reckon I need a little rest. Good-evening."

Putnam lingered after she was gone. He found his way to his old bench under the cedars and sat there for a while. He had not occupied this seat since his first meeting with Miss Pinckney in the summer-house, and the initials which he had whittled on its edge impressed him as belonging to some bygone stage of his history. This was the first time that she had questioned him about himself. His sympathy had won her confidence, but she had treated him hitherto in an impersonal way, as something tributary to her brother's memory, like the tombstone or the flowers on his grave. The suspicion that he was seeking her for her own sake had not, so far as Putnam could discover, ever entered her thoughts.

But in the course of their next few interviews there came a change in her behavior. The simplicity and unconsciousness of her sorrow had become complicated with some other feeling. He caught her looking at him narrowly once or twice, and when he looked hard at her there was visible in her manner a soft agitation—something which in a girl of more sanguine complexion might have been interpreted as a blush. She sometimes suffered herself to be coaxed a little way into talking of things remote from the subject of her sorrow. Occasionally she questioned Putnam shyly about himself, and he needed but slight encouragement to wax confidential. She listened quietly to his experiences, and even smiled now and then at something that he said. His heart beat high with triumph: he fancied that he was leading her slowly up out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

But the upward path was a steep one. She had many sudden relapses and changes of mood. Putnam divined that she felt her grief loosening its tight hold on her and slipping away, and that she clung to it as a consecrated thing with a morbid fear of losing it altogether. There were days when her demeanor betokened a passionate self-reproach, as though she accused herself secretly of wronging her brother and profaning his tomb in allowing more cheerful thoughts to blunt the edge of her bereavement. He remarked also that her eyes were often red from weeping. There sometimes mingled with her remorse a plain resentment toward himself. At such times she would hardly speak to him, and the slightest gayety or even cheerfulness on his part was received as downright heartlessness. He made a practice, therefore, of withdrawing at once whenever he found her in this frame of mind.

One day they had been sitting long together. She had appeared unusually content, but had spoken little. The struggle in her heart had perhaps worn itself out for the present, and she had yielded to the warm current of life and hope which was bearing her back into the sunshine. Suddenly the elderly woman who had formed one of the company in the summer-house on the day of the thunderstorm passed along the walk with her trowel and watering-pot. She nodded to Miss Pinckney, and then, pausing opposite the pair, glanced sharply from one to the other, smiled significantly and passed on. This trifling incident aroused Putnam's companion from her reverie: she looked at him with a troubled expression and said, "Do you think you ought to come here so much?"

"Why not?"

"I don't know. How well did you know my brother Henry?"

"If I didn't know him so very intimately when he was living, I feel that I know him well now from all that you have told me about him. And, if you will pardon my saying so, I feel that I know his sister a little too, and have some title to her acquaintance."

"You have been very kind, and I am grateful for it, but perhaps you ought not to come so much."

"I'm sorry if I have come too much," rejoined Putnam bitterly, "but I shall not come much more. I am going away soon. The doctor says I am not getting along fast enough and must have change of air. He has ordered me to the mountains."

There was silence for a few minutes. He was looking moodily down at the turf, pulling a blade of grass now and then, biting it and throwing it away.

"I thank you very much for your sympathy and kindness," she said at length, rising from her chair; "and I hope you will recover very fast in the mountains. Good-bye."

She extended her hand, which Putnam took and held. It was trembling perceptibly. "Wait a moment," he said. "Before I go I should like to show some little mark of respect to your brother's memory. Won't you meet me at the green-house to-morrow morning—say about nine o'clock—and select a few flowers? They will be your flowers, you know—your offering."

"Yes," she answered, "I will; and I thank you again for him."

The next morning at the appointed hour Putnam descended the steps into the green-house. The gardener had just watered the plants. A rich steam exhaled from the earth and clouded all the glass, and the moist air was heavy with the breath of heliotropes and roses. A number of butterflies were flying about, and at the end of a many-colored perspective of leaves and blossoms Putnam saw Miss Pinckney hovering around a collection of tropical orchids. The gardener had passed on into an adjoining hot-house, and no sound broke the quiet but the dripping of water in a tank of aquatic plants. The fans of the palms and the long fronds of the tree-ferns hung as still as in some painting of an Indian isle.

She greeted him with a smile and held out her hand to him. The beauty of the morning and of the place had wrought in her a gentle intoxication, and the mournful nature of her errand was for the moment forgotten. "Isn't it delicious here?" she exclaimed: "I think I should like to live in a green-house and grow like a plant."

"A little of that kind of thing would do you no end of good," he replied—"a little concentrated sunshine and bright colors and the smell of the fresh earth, you know. If you were my patient, I would make you take a course of it. I'd say you wanted more vegetable tissue, and prescribe a green-house for six months. I've no doubt this man here would take you. A young-lady apprentice would be quite an attractive feature. You could pull off dead leaves and strike graceful attitudes, training up vines, like the gardener's daughter in Tennyson."

"What are those gorgeous things?" she asked, pointing to a row of orchids hung on nails along the wall.

"Those are epiphytic orchids—air-plants, you know: they require no earth for their roots: they live on the air."

"Like a chameleon?"

"Like a chameleon."

He took down from its nail one of the little wooden slabs, and showed her the roots coiled about it, with the cluster of bulbs. The flower was snow-white and shaped like a butterfly. The fringe of the lip was of a delicate rose-pink, and at the base of it were two spots of rich maroon, each with a central spot of the most vivid orange. Every color was as pronounced as though it were the only one.

"What a daring combination!" she cried. "If a lady should dress in all those colors she'd be thought vulgar, but somehow it doesn't seem vulgar in a flower."

She turned the blossom over and looked at the under side of the petals. "Those orange spots show right through the leaf," she went on, "as if they were painted and the paint laid on thick."

"Do you know," said Putnam, "that what you've just said gives me a good deal of encouragement?"

"Encouragement? How?"

"Well, it's the first really feminine thing—At least—no, I don't mean that. But it makes me think that you are more like other girls."

His explanation was interrupted by the entrance of the gardener.

"Will you select some of those orchids, please—if you like them, that is?" asked Putnam.

A shade passed over her face. "They are too gay for his—for Henry," she answered.

"Try to tolerate a little brightness to-day," he pleaded in a low voice. "You must dedicate this morning to me: it's the last, you know."

"I will take a few of them if you wish it, but not this one. I will take that little white one and that large purple one."

The gardener reached down the varieties which she pointed out, and they passed along the alley to select other flowers. She chose a number of white roses, dark-shaded fuchsias and English violets, and then they left the place. Her expression had grown thoughtful, though not precisely sad. They walked slowly up the long shady street leading to the cemetery.

"I am dropping some of the flowers," she said, stopping: "will you carry these double fuchsias a minute, please, while I fasten the others?"

He took them and laughed. "Now, if this were in a novel," he said, "what a neat opportunity for me to say, 'May I not always carry your double fuchsias?'"

She looked at him quickly, and her brown cheek blushed rosy red, but she started on without making any reply and walked faster.

"She takes," he said to himself. But he saw the cemetery-gate at the end of the street. "I must make this walk last longer," he thought. Accordingly, he invented several cunning devices to prolong it, stopping now and then to point out something worth noting in the handsome grounds which lined the street. And so they sauntered along, she appearing to have forgotten the speech which had embarrassed her, or at least she did not resent it. They paused in front of a well-kept lawn, and he drew her attention to the turf. "It's almost as dark as the evergreens," he said.

"Yes," she answered, "it's so green that it's almost blue."

"What do you suppose makes the bees gather round that croquet-stake so?"

"I reckon they take the bright colors on it for flowers," she answered, with a certain quaintness of fancy which he had often remarked in her.

As they stood there leaning against the fence a party of school-girls came along with their satchels and spelling-books. They giggled and stared as they passed the fence, and one of them, a handsome, long-legged, bold-faced thing, said aloud, "Oh my! Look at me and my fancy beau a-takin' a walk!"

Putnam glanced at his companion, who colored nervously and looked away. "Saucy little giglets!" he laughed. "Did you hear what she said?"

"Yes," almost inaudibly.

"I hope it didn't annoy you?"

"It was very rude," walking on.

"Well, I rather like naughty school-girls: they are amusing creatures. When I was a very small boy I was sent to a girls' school, and I used to study their ways. They always had crumbs in their apron-pockets; they used to write on a slate, 'Tommy is a good boy,' and hold it up for me to see when the teacher wasn't looking; they borrowed my geography at recess and painted all the pictures vermilion and yellow." He paused, but she said nothing, and he continued, talking against time, "There was one piece of chewing-gum in that school which circulated from mouth to mouth. It had been originally spruce gum, I believe, but it was masticated beyond recognition: the parent tree wouldn't have known her child. One day I found it hidden away on a window-sill behind the shutter. It was flesh-colored and dented all over with the marks of sharp little teeth. I kept that chewing-gum for a week, and the school was like a cow that's lost her cud."

As Putnam completed these reminiscences they entered the cemetery-gate, and the shadow of its arch seemed to fall across the young girl's soul. The bashful color had faded from her cheek and the animation from her eye. Her face wore a troubled expression: she walked slowly and looked about at the gravestones.

Putnam stopped talking abruptly, but presently said, "You have not asked me for your fuchsias."

She stood still and held out her hand for them.

"I thought you might be meaning to let me keep them," said Putnam. His heart beat fast and his voice trembled as he continued: "Perhaps you thought that what I said a while ago was said in joke, but I mean it in real earnest."

"Mean what?" she asked faintly.

"Don't you know what I mean?" he said, coming nearer and taking her hand. "Shall I tell you, darling?"

"Oh, please don't! Oh, I think I know. Not here—not now. Give me the flowers," she said, disengaging her hand, "and I will put them on Henry's grave."

He handed them to her and said, "I won't go on now if it troubles you; but tell me first—I am going away to-morrow, and sha'n't be back till October—shall I find you here then, and may I speak then?"

"I shall be here till winter."

"And may I speak then?"

"Yes."

"And will you listen?"

"Yes."

"Then I can wait."

They moved on again along the cemetery-walks. Putnam felt an exultation that he could not suppress. In spite of her language, her face and the tone of her voice had betrayed her. He knew that she cared for him. But in the blindness of his joy he failed to notice an increasing agitation in her manner, which foretold the approach of some painful crisis of feeling. Her conflicting emotions, long pent up, were now in most delicate equilibrium. The slightest shock might throw them out of balance. Putnam's nature, though generous and at bottom sympathetic, lacked the fineness of insight needed to interpret the situation. Like many men of robust and heedless temperament, he was more used to bend others' moods to his own than to enter fully into theirs. His way of approaching the subject had been unfortunate, beginning as he had with a jest. The sequel was destined to be still more unlucky.

They had reached a part of the cemetery which was not divided into lots, but formed a sort of burial commons for the behoof of the poor. It was used mainly by Germans, and the graves were principally those of children. The headstones were wooden, painted white, with inscriptions in black or gilt lettering. Humble edgings of white pebbles or shells, partly embedded in the earth, bordered some of the graves: artificial flowers, tinsel crosses, hearts and other such fantastic decorations lay upon the mounds. Putnam's companion paused with an expression of pity before one of these uncouth sepulchres, a little heap of turf which covered the body of a "span-long babe."

"Now, isn't that echt Deutsch?" began Putnam, whom the gods had made mad. "Is that glass affair let into the tombstone a looking-glass or a portrait of the deceased—like that 'statoot of a deceased infant' that Holmes tells about? Even our ancestral cherub and willow tree are better than that, or even the inevitable sick lamb and broken lily."

"The people are poor," she murmured.

"They do the same sort of thing when they're rich. It's the national Geschmack to stick little tawdry fribbles all over the face of Nature."

"Poor little baby!" she said gently.

"It's a rather old baby by this time," rejoined Putnam, pointing out the date on the wooden slab—"Eighteen fifty-one: it would be older than I now if it had kept on."

Her eyes fell upon the inscription, and she read it aloud. "Hier ruht in Gott Heinrich Frantz, Geb. Mai 13, 1851. Gest. August 4, 1852. Wir hoffen auf Wiedersehen." She repeated the last words softly over to herself.

"Are those white things cobblestones, or what?" continued Putnam perversely, indicating the border which quaintly encircled the little mound. "As I live," he exclaimed, "they are door-knobs!" and he poked one of them out of the ground with the end of his cane.

"Stop!" she cried vehemently: "how can you do that?"

He dropped his cane and looked at her in wonder. She burst into tears and turned away. "You think I am a heartless brute?" he cried remorsefully, hastening after her.

"Oh, go away, please—go away and leave me alone. I am going to my brother: I want to be alone."

She hurried on, and he paused irresolute. "Miss Pinckney!" he called after her, but she made no response. His instinct, now aroused too late, told him that he had better leave her alone for the present. So he picked up his walking-stick and turned reluctantly homeward. He cursed himself mentally as he retraced the paths along which they had walked together a few moments before. "I'm a fool," he said to himself: "I've gone and upset it all. Couldn't I see that she was feeling badly? I suppose I imagined that I was funny, and she thought I was an insensible brute. This comes of giving way to my infernal high spirits." At the same time a shade of resentment mingled with his self-reproaches. "Why can't she be a little more cheerful and like other girls, and make some allowance for a fellow?" he asked. "Her brother wasn't everybody else's brother. It's downright morbid, this obstinate woe of hers. Other people have lost friends and got over it."

On the morrow he was to start for the mountains. He visited the cemetery in the morning, but Miss Pinckney was not there. He did not know her address, nor could the gatekeeper inform him; and in the afternoon he set out on his journey with many misgivings.

It was early October when Putnam returned to the city. He went at once to the cemetery, but on reaching the grave his heart sank at the sight of a bunch of withered flowers which must have lain many days upon the mound. The blossoms were black and the stalks brittle and dry. "Can she have changed her mind and gone South already?" he asked himself.

There was a new sexton in the gate-house, who could tell him nothing about her. He wandered through the grounds, looking for the old woman with the watering-pot, but the season had grown cold, and she had probably ceased her gardening operations for the year. He continued his walk beyond the marshes. The woods had grown rusty and the sandy pastures outside the city were ringing with the incessant creak of grasshoppers, which rose in clouds under his feet as he brushed through the thin grass. The blue-curl and the life-everlasting distilled their pungent aroma in the autumn sunshine. A feeling of change and forlornness weighed upon his spirit. As with Thomas of Ercildoune, whom the Queen of FaËry carried away into Eildon Hill, the short period of his absence seemed seven years long. An old English song came into his head:

Soon after arriving at the hills he had written to Miss Pinckney a long letter of explanations and avowals; but he did not know the number of her lodgings, or, oddly enough, even her Christian name, and the letter had been returned to him unopened. The next month was one of the unhappiest in Putnam's life. On returning to the city, thoroughly restored in health, he had opened an office, but he found it impossible to devote himself quietly to the duties of his profession. He visited the cemetery at all hours, but without success. He took to wandering about in remote quarters and back streets of the town, and eyed sharply every female figure that passed him in the twilight, especially if it walked quickly or wore a veil. He slept little at night, and grew restless and irritable. He had never confided this experience even to his mother: it seemed to him something apart.

One afternoon toward the middle of November he was returning homeward weary and dejected from a walk in the suburbs. His way led across an unenclosed outskirt of the town which served as a common to the poor people of the neighborhood. It was traversed by a score of footpaths, and frequented by goats, and by ducks that dabbled in the puddles of rain-water collected in the hollows. Halfway across this open tract stood what had formerly been an old-fashioned country-house, now converted into a soap-boiling establishment. Around this was a clump of old pine trees, the remnant of a grove which had once flourished in the sandy soil. There was something in the desolation of the place that flattered Putnam's mood, and he stopped to take it in. The air was dusk, but embers of an angry sunset burned low in the west. A cold wind made a sound in the pine-tops like the beating of surf on a distant shore. A flock of little winter birds flew suddenly up from the ground into one of the trees, like a flight of gray leaves whirled up by a gust. As Putnam turned to look at them he saw, against the strip of sunset along the horizon, the slim figure of a girl walking rapidly toward the opposite side of the common. His heart gave a great leap, and he started after her on a run. At a corner of the open ground the figure vanished, nor could Putnam decide into which of two or three small streets she had turned. He ran down one and up another, but met no one except a few laborers coming home from work, and finally gave up the quest. But this momentary glimpse produced in him a new excitement. He felt sure that he had not been mistaken: he knew the swift, graceful step, the slight form bending in the wind. He fancied that he had even recognized the poise and shape of the little head. He imagined, too, that he had not been unobserved, and that she had some reason for avoiding him. For a week or more he haunted the vicinity of the common, but without result. December was already drawing to an end when he received the following note:

Putnam felt stunned and benumbed on first reading this letter. Then he read it over mechanically two or three times. The date was a month old, but the postmark showed that it had just been mailed. She must have postponed her departure somewhat after writing it, or the person with whom it had been left had neglected to post it till now. He felt a sudden oppression and need of air, and taking his hat left the house. It was evening, and the first snow of the season lay deep on the ground. Anger and grief divided his heart. "It's too bad! too bad!" he murmured, with tears in his eyes: "she might have given me one chance to speak. She hasn't been fair to me. What's the matter with her, anyhow? She has brooded and brooded till she is downright melancholy-mad;" and then, with a revulsion of feeling, "My poor darling girl! Here she has been, sick and all alone, sitting day after day in that cursed graveyard. I ought never to have gone to the mountains: I ought to have stayed. I might have known how it would turn out. Well, it's all over now, I suppose."

He had taken, half unconsciously, the direction of the cemetery, and now found himself at the entrance. The gate was locked, but he climbed over the wall and waded through the snow to the spot where he had sat with her so many summer afternoons. The wicker chair was buried out of sight in a drift. A scarcely-visible undulation in the white level marked the position of the mound, and the headstone had a snow-cap. The cedars stood black in the dim moonlight, and the icy coating of their boughs rattled like candelabra. He stood a few moments near the railing, and then tore the letter into fragments and threw them on the snow. "There! good-bye, good-bye!" he said bitterly as the wind carried them skating away over the crust.

But what was that? The moon cast a shadow of Henry Pinckney's headstone on the snow, but what was that other and similar shadow beyond it? Putnam had been standing edgewise to the slab: he shifted his position now and saw a second stone and a second mound side by side with the first. An awful faintness and trembling seized him as he approached it and bent his head close down to the marble. The jagged shadows of the cedar-branches played across the surface, but by the uncertain light he could read the name "Imogen Pinckney," and below it the inscription, "Wir hoffen auf Wiedersehen."

Henry A. Beers.