A broken stonewall overgrown with brambles enclosed the old church-yard, where a few fallen and mouldering gravestones, half sunk among the dead leaves, still remained. All around the church, on the bottom of the dell, and up the sides of the steeps, were thickly clustered forest-trees, now glowing refulgent in their gorgeous autumn livery of crimson and gold, scarlet and purple. A little rill, an offspring of the Black Torrent, tumbled down the side of the mountain behind the church, and ran frolicking irreverently through the old graveyard. The great cascade was out of sight, though very near for its thunder filled the air. "See," said Sybil, pointing to the little singing rill; "Nature is unsympathetic. She can laugh and frolic over the dead, and, besides, the suffering." "It would seem, then, that Nature is wiser as well as gladder than we are; since she, who is transitory, rejoices while we, who are immortal, pine," answered Lyon Berners, pleased that any thought should win her from the contemplation of her misfortune. He then led the way into the old ruined church through the door frames, from which the doors had long been lost. The stone floor, and the stone altar still remained; all else within the building was gone. Lyon Berners looked all around, up and down the interior, from the arched ceiling to the side-walls with their window spaces and the flagstone floor with its mouldy seams. The wild creeping vines nearly filled the window spaces, and shaded the interior more beautifully than carved shutters, velvet curtains, or even stained glass could have done. The flagstone floor was strewn with fallen leaves that had drifted in. Up and down, in every nook and corner of the roof and windows, last year's empty birds nests perched. And here and there along the walls, the humble "mason's" little clay house stuck. But there seemed no resting place for the weary travellers, until Sybil, with a serious smile, went up to the altar and sank upon the lowest step, and beckoned Lyon to join her, saying: "At the foot of the altar, dear Lyon, there was sanctuary in the olden times. We seem to realize the idea now." "You are cold. Your clothes are all damp. Stop! I must try to raise a fire. But you, in the meantime, must walk briskly up and down, to keep from being chilled to death," answered Lyon Berners very practically, as he proceeded to gather dry leaves and twigs that had drifted into the interior of the old church. He piled them up in the centre of the floor, just under the break in the roof, and then he went out and gathered sticks and brushwood, and built up a little mound. Lastly he took a box of matches from his pocket and struck a light, and kindled the fire. The dried leaves and twigs crackled and blazed, and the smoke ascended in a straight column to the hole in the roof through which it escaped.