The motive which dictates the request is the same that had made him ask which chair she is wont to occupy in the drawing-room. He is collecting frames for the gallery of pictures of her that is to hang in his heart. She gives a slight assenting nod, and sets off with an undecided step, turning over in her mind, with a view to choosing it, which of her familiar paths is the one that is least associated with Rupert’s companionship. It is safe, at all events, to begin with the churchyard. Every new-comer is shown the gigantic brother yews, and told how much is the eight-century girth of the largest one. “It measures thirty-four feet in circumference,” she says, in a dull show-woman’s voice, as she has said scores of times before to politely astonished visitors. And then they stand silent, staring at the erebus of shade above their heads, at the enormous branch which, in some former storm--now itself long ago--has shown symptoms of breaking away from the colossal trunk, and has taken such a gigantic prop to support it. From under the eternal night of the tree, day is seen to laugh over the rather neglected green mounds around--neglected as rural churchyards are discreditably often apt to be, but over which the kindly wild flowers are waving unbidden. “If you outlive me, which is unlikely, this is where you may finally think of me,” says Lavinia, speaking at last. “It is not very imaginative of one to live and die on the same quarter of an acre, is it? The entrance to our vault is on the other side of the church.” She gives her piece of information with a sort of alacrity, in contrast to the muffled dulness of her last sentences. “You say it as if you were telling me a piece of good news.” “You wished to know where I generally sit and walk. I thought you might carry your interest a step further, and like to know where I am to lie.” He turns aside, as if to examine one of the chipped truisms on a lichened headstone; but not before she has seen a glimpse, and divined the rest, of the disfigurement her cruel and unworthy appeal to his pity has worked on his still sickness-thinned and hollowed face. A bitter pang of self-condemnation adds itself to a mocking memory of one, and the most emphatic, of Féodorovna’s nursing injunctions--to be sure not to mention any subject in the least painful to her patient. Is this the way in which she is fulfilling it? He is trying his hardest to behave like an honourable gentleman; and instead of helping him, she is--because it gives herself some relief from her intolerable pain--setting the stumbling-block of her cowardly bid for compassion in his way. She half puts out her hand to touch the sleeve which still bags upon his arm; then draws it back. “I have thought of a walk,” she says, in a better and braver voice.