She stood quite still, looking down, not hearing him until he was close upon her. She seemed startled when she saw him. "Why did you come here?" she asked. "I don't know," he answered. "I needed quiet, I suppose, and the place has a quiet look. Why did you come?" "It is not the first time I have been," she said. "I come here often." "You!" he said. "Why?" She pointed to the mound at her feet. "Because _he_ is here," she said, "and I have learned to care for him." She knelt down and laid her hand upon the grass, and he remembered her emotion in the strange scene which had occurred before. "I know him very well," she said. "I _know_ him." "You told me that I would not understand," he said. "It is true that I don't yet----" Suddenly there were tears in her eyes and in her voice. "He does not seem a dead man to me," she said. "He never will." "I do not think," he answered, heavily, "that his life seems at an end to any of us." "Not to me," she repeated. "I have thought of him until I have seemed to grow near to him, and to know what his burden was, and how patiently he bore it. I have never been patient. I have rebelled always, and so it has gone to my heart all the more." Murdoch looked down upon the covering sod with a pang. "He did bear it patiently," he said, "at the bitterest and worst." "I know that," she replied. "I have been sure of it." "I found some papers in my room when I first came," she went on. "Some of them were plans he had drawn thirty years ago. He had been very patient and constant with them. He had drawn the same thing again and again. Often he had written a few words upon them, and they helped me to understand. After I had looked them over I could not forget. They haunted me and came back to me. I began to care for him, and put things together until all was real." Then she added, slowly and in a lowered voice: "I have even thought that if he had lived he would have been fond of me. I don't know why, but I have thought that perhaps he would." For the first time in his knowledge of her, Murdoch saw in her the youth he had always missed. Her dark and bitter young face was softened; for the moment she seemed almost a child,--even though a child whose life had been clouded by the shadow of sin and wrong. "I think--he would," he said, slowly. "And I have got into the habit of coming here when I was lonely or--at my worst." "You are lonely often, I dare say," he returned, wearily. "I wish it could be helped." "It is nothing new," she replied, with something of her old manner, "and there is no help for it." But her touch upon the grass was a caress. She smoothed it softly, and moved with singular gentleness a few dead leaves which had dropped upon it. "When I come here I am--better," she said, "and--less hard. Things do not seem to matter so much--or to look so shameful." A pause followed, which she herself broke in upon.