Once outside, she walked aimlessly through the orchard--in preference to the high road, where she might meet neighbors--toward the little family graveyard. It was not until she had nearly reached this spot that she recalled having heard that Seth, too, came here on that terrible night. The recollection brought an added sense of all the wrongs she held to have been done her. She stood for a long time by the old board fence, with its coating of dry, mildew-like moss on the weather-beaten surfaces turned to the north, and its inhospitable hedging of brown, half-bare briars, and looked in reverie upon the tombs within the enclosure. Three generations of the Fairchilds lay here under the straggling mat of withered strawberry vines. She saw the low blue-slate slabs, nearly covered now by aspiring weeds and brambles, which modestly pleaded in antique letters that the original shoemaker, Roger, and his lowly spouse might not be altogether forgotten. Rising ostentatiously above these timid, ancient memorials, as if with intent to divert attention from their humility, was the marble obelisk marking the resting-place of the family’s greatest man, the Hon. Seth Fairchild. The monument was not so white or so imposing now as it once had been, and the proud inscription setting forth how its subject had been “twice Senator of the State of New York,” was almost illegible from the storm-stains and mould on its venerable front. There were some other stones, gray and small, tipping humbly toward the central monolith, as if mutely begging at least a little share of the Senator’s greatness for his wife and sisters, and nearer were two plain modern slabs recounting the sole interesting facts of the colorless lives of Lemuel and Cicely Fair-child--that they had been alive, and now were dead. Here still nearer her, almost at her feet, the widow saw some pegs driven in the ground, with string stretched around them to form a long rectangle. The sight brought no thrill to her. She was conscious of all its meaning, but felt herself scarcely interested. In life she had owed nothing but dislike to the man whose last coming these signs of preparation betokened. His death had shocked her at first by its fearful suddenness; it did not especially disturb her now, save at times with a furtive elation at the accompanying thought that at last she was free. Her thoughts were with the living--and their relation to those long since dead. If these rambling thoughts could have been summarized in words they would have run in this fashion: