"Yes, I know. And, except for the kindness of your fairy godmother, I believe you are perfectly right. _That_, of course, is a different question." Barbara would not answer what she fancied might be a sneer. "You see the place at its worst," she said, "and there is nobody to care for it; everything is neglected and going to ruin. Don't you think it would be different if it belonged to some one who loved it? Why don't you make your fortune," she exclaimed, with sanguine, bright-eyed directness, as if the fortune were an easy certainty, "and come back and set everything right? Don't you think you could care for Mitchelhurst if----" She would have finished her sentence readily enough, but Reynold caught it up. "_If!_" he said, with a sudden startled significance in his tone. Then, with an air of prompt deference, "Shall I go and make the fortune at once, Miss Strange? Shall I? Yes, I think I could care for Mitchelhurst, as you say, _if_--" He smiled. "One might do much with a fortune, no doubt." "Make it then," said Barbara, conscious of a faint and undefined embarrassment. "Must it be a very big one?" "Oh, I think it may as well be a tolerable size, while you are about it. Hadn't we better be moving on?" Mr. Harding assented. "Where are we going now?" "To the church. That is, if you care to go there." "Oh, I like to go very much. I wonder what you would call a tolerable fortune," he said in a meditative tone. "My opinion doesn't matter." "But you are going to wish me success while I am away making it?" "Oh, certainly." "That will be a help," he said gravely. "I shan't look for an omen in the sky just now--do you see how threatening it is out yonder?" The clouds rolled heavily upwards, and massed themselves above their heads as they hastened down a steep lane which brought them out by the church. Barbara stopped at the clerk's cottage for a ponderous key, and then led the way through a little creaking gate. The path along which they went was like a narrow ditch, the mould, heaped high on either side, seemed as if it were burdened with his imprisoned secrets. The undulating graves, overgrown with coarse grasses, rose up, wave-like, against the buttressed walls of the churchyard, high above the level of the outer road. The church itself looked as if it had been dug out of the sepulchral earth, so closely was it surrounded by these shapeless mounds. Barbara, to whom the scene was nothing new, and who was eager to escape the impending shower, flitted, alive, warm, and young, through all this cold decay, and never heeded it. Harding followed her, looking right and left. They passed under two dusky yew trees, and then she thrust her big key into the lock of the south door. "Are my people buried in the churchyard?" he asked. "Oh, no!" she exclaimed reverentially. "Your people are all inside."