Another autumn had come round. Ellin Delorane, feeble now, sat in the church-porch, the graveyard lying around her under the hot September sun, soon herself to be laid there. Chancing to take that way round from buying some figs at Salmon's for Hugh and Lena, I saw her, and dashed up the churchyard path. "You seem to have set up a love for this lively spot, Ellin! You were sitting here the last time I passed by." "The sun is hot yet, and I get tired, so I come across here for a rest when out this way," she answered, a sweet smile on her wan face and a hectic on her thin cheeks. "Won't you stay with me for a little while, Johnny?" "Are you better, Ellin?" I asked, taking my place on the opposite bench, which brought my knees near to hers, for the porch was not much more than big enough for a coffin to pass through. She gently shook her head as she glanced across at me, a steadfast look in her sad brown eyes. "Don't you see how it is, Johnny? That I shall never be better in this world?" "Your weakness may take a turn, Ellin; it may indeed. And--_he_ may come back yet." "He will never come back: rely upon that," she quietly said. "He is waiting for me on the Eternal shores." Her gaze went out afar, over the gravestones and the green meadows beyond, almost (one might fancy) into the blue skies, as if she could see those shores in the distant horizon. "Is it well to lose hope, Eileen mavourneen?" "The hope of his returning died out long ago," she answered. "Those dreams that visited me so strangely last year, night after night, night after night, seemed to take _that_ from me. Perhaps they came to do it. You remember them, Johnny?" "I cannot think, Ellin, how you could put faith in a parcel of dreams!" "It was not in the dreams I put faith--exactly. It was in the mysterious influence--I hope I don't speak profanely--which caused me to have the dreams. A silent, undetected influence that I understood not and never grasped--but it was there. Curious dreams they were," she added, after a pause; "curious that they should have come to me. William was always lost, and I, with others, was always searching for him--and never, never found him. They lasted, Johnny, for weeks and months; and almost from the time of their first setting-in, the impression, that I should never see him again, lay latent in my heart." "Do they visit you still?" "No. At least, they have changed in character. Ever since the night that he seems to have been really lost, the 19th of October. How you look at me, Johnny!" "You speak so strangely."