She went upstairs; he passed out into the golden glow of the afternoon. It was not a beautiful village, this: plain, unlovely, melancholy in the last degree; moreover, his own mind was filled with dim and dark forebodings; so that a sort of gloom of death and separation seemed to hang over those houses. Nor was there anything to look at, for the distraction of thought. An English village would have had a picturesque old church and a pretty churchyard; here there was nothing but a small mission-house of the most dull and forbidding exterior, while, just beyond the last of the hovels, there was a cemetery—a mound enclosed by a stone wall. He went to the gate, and stood there a long time, with some curious fancies and imaginings coming into his head. He seemed to see an open grave there, and a small knot of people, himself the chief mourner. And then, after the simple and solemn ceremony, he saw himself leave the sad enclosure and go away back through the unlovely street, rather fearing what lay before him. For how was he to attempt to console the solitary girl awaiting him there in her despair and her tears? But behold now, if there were any charity and commiseration left in the world—if one, hitherto obdurate, would but consent to bury her enmity in that open grave they had left—as well she might, for there was no one to offend her now—and if she were to reach out a woman’s hand to this lonely girl, and take her with her, and shelter her, until the time of her sorrow was over? This was a bleak, plain, commonplace sort of a burial ground into which he was gazing: but none the less had human hearts come away from it heavy and remorseful—remorseful when it was too late. And if some little atonement were to be offered in the way he had imagined—if it were the only thing now left? This girl, sitting alone there in her desperate grief—without kindred—without friends—without any home or habitation to turn her face to: surely her situation was of all things possible most forlorn—surely no woman’s heart could resist that mute appeal for sympathy and association?