“It’s true,” she said; “’tis an old, hard country; and such ghosts as there are are bleached bones by now, dry and clean; there’s no decay about them. Why, I think that the ghosts that walk among the stones must be as stern as the stones themselves; and that’s my fancy.” “And mine too,” he replied, considering her; “and if anywhere the uneasy dead return from their sleep,--though I am not saying that I believe it to be so,--it should surely be hereabouts, for in the last century there were enough tales current of witches and wise men, and similar fascinations of the simple, to raise the longest-dead of old Britons from his grave. But I scarcely think the local folk are much troubled with such ideas. They come more readily to you and me, for I am a stranger, as strangers are reckoned in country districts, where the years only begin to count as they pass into centuries; the space of time for an acorn to grow into an oak; and even you, who have been here all your life long, are not native born. The spirit of this country does not come to either of us as a natural right. We have learnt it, and so must remain always more conscious of it than those to whom it is as native speech.” She looked at him with the faintly puzzled expression of one who is out of his depth. “Yes,” she murmured uneasily, looking down at the ground, and kicking a lump of chalk into powder with the toe of her shoe. She deeply resented this association of herself and him as strangers to the country; Lovel would not have spoken so! “You and I,” he went on, for it caressed his soul merely to utter those words thus coupled, “tread at least as reverent intruders among the rings and barrows. We do not rest among them, as the shepherds do, simply for shelter against the winds and sleets. I came to them for healing; and you, even had you not been born with the capacity for awe,--as you were, oh, as indeed I know you were!--would have learnt it from that wise old man, your father. I have thought watching him at that delicate fingering of his shards, how he had dealt out to you the store of his scholar’s brain. To him, neat, tabulated, chronological, precise, but filtering through to yours in a strange jumble,--the painting of a bison on the wall of a cave, a man in thongs and bearskins sharpening a flint, slow glaciers crawling over England, kings buried on horseback in full panoply under a mound.” “And did you find healing?” she inquired, catching on to the remark she could pursue with the least resentment. “Oh, I found it, yes, I found it,” he replied, morosely, “if I may call that healing, which but exchanges one wound for another,--a poisonous wound, let us say, for a clean sharp one. Yes, I may call it healing, I suppose, for although my heart’s blood ebbs away through the fresh wound, there is no longer any gangrene in my system. I am purified; true, I may be dying, but at least I am purified. Yes, I found healing.” “Dying?” she exclaimed.