Joyce had walked a long way on a long gray ribbon of road before it wound up hill and she began to realize where her steps were turning. Up there on the top was the dark outline of the old Hill Church, its spire a black dart against the luminous night sky. A fitful moon gleamed palely and showed it for a moment, still and gray like a little lone dove asleep, and about it clustered the white stones of the graveyard on the side of the hill sloping down toward the valley. One tall shaft showed where lay the dust of the rich, old, good man who gave the land and built the church, and others less pretentious flocked close at hand, a little social clique of the select dead who had clung to the old church through the years of their life, who there had been christened, married and buried. With a catch in her breath like a sob Joyce hurried on, realizing that it was here her heart was longing to go, where she had left all that was mortal of her precious Aunt Mary. It was not that she had any feeling that the spirit she loved was lingering there near its worn out earthly habitation, it was only that the earth seemed so alien and she so alone that it did her good to creep away to the quiet mound that some kind neighbor had already made velvety with close shaved turf. She felt her way to the place, close beside the mound where her mother had been laid. They had always kept it neat and carefully tended when her aunt was alive, and now she sank down between the two graves with her hands spread broodingly, anguishingly over the tender grass, and her face dropped down on its coolness. How long she lay there she did not know. The hot tears flowed relievingly down her cheeks and fell into the cool grass, and overhead the quiet sky, with the single star in a clearing among the floating clouds, and now and then the serene, busy moon above it all, quite as if the world was going as it should even though hearts were being broken. A sense of peace stole gradually upon her, and the ache drifted out of her weary limbs, and out of her lonely heart. It was almost as if some comfort had stolen upon her from the quiet grass, and the busy, serene heaven above. She did not feel afraid. She had no sense of the presence of her aunt, only a deep, sweet understanding that this little spot was sacred and here she might think entirely unmolested.