Three aspens, standing together in the park, arrested her gaze, and she looked at them with momentary intentness. Their slender bodies shone like leprous fingers, pointing heavenward, and on the topmost point of one a broken spray of frosted leaves shivered whitely. They recalled to her with a shudder the little graveyard on the old plantation, where she had spent her earliest childhood, and she was seized with a spasm of memory. She saw the forgotten and deserted graves, with the rank periwinkle corroding the marble slabs, and she saw the little brown lizards that crept out to bask upon them in the summer sunshine. With the recollection, death appeared to her hideous and loathsome, and she walked on quickly, her eyes on the pavement. A group of street-cleaners were seated against the stone wall, eating their mid-day meal, and she looked at the hunks of bread and ham with a feeling of sympathy for the consumers. Then, as she passed, her thoughts swung to the owner of the house across the way whom she knew, and who was descending the front steps. At Sixty-seventh Street she turned into the park, her eyes drawn by the clump of pines darkly defined against the gray rock beyond. For the second time her errant thoughts went back to her childhood and to the great pine forest where the wind played lullabies through the white heat of August days. She felt a swift desire to throw herself beneath the little alien growth of pine, to lie on the soft grass, which was still like emerald deepened by bluish shadows, and to let the spicy needles fall upon her upturned face. As she moved onward, a man crossing the park in a rapid walk approached her. It was Father Algarcife, and in a moment their glances met. He raised his hat, and would have passed on, but she stopped him by a gesture. "Won't you speak to me?" she asked, and her voice wavered like a harp over which the player has lost control. As she looked at him she saw that he had grown thinner since she had last seen him, and that his eyes shone with an unnatural lustre. "What is there for me to say?" he returned, arresting her wavering glance. Her lips quivered. "I may go away," she said, "and this is the last chance. There is something I must tell you. Will you turn and walk back with me?" He shook his head. "What is the use?" he asked, impatiently. "There is nothing to be said that cannot better be left--unsaid." "No! No!" she said. "You must not think worse of me than--than I deserve." He was smiling bitterly. "What I think of you," he returned, "matters very little." Then the smile passed, and he looked at her gravely. "I have little time," he said. "My days are not my own." And he added, slowly: "If you wish it, I will walk back with you for a short distance." "Thank you," she replied, and they passed the clump of pines on their way in the park.