"Partly because they have been away during the three years that you have been in the habit of visiting us,--and partly because Mr. Axtell, and his sister, too, I think, have a very decided way of avoiding us. What induces Mr. Axtell to perform the office of sexton is more than any one in the congregation can divine." "I intend to find out, Sophie." "How?" "In some way,--how, I cannot tell." "In the interim, take some breakfast, or you'll lose your curiosity in hunger." Aaron sent for Sophie just here, and, as usual, I was deserted for him. I began to scheme a little. "If Miss Axtell had only been the sexton, I could have found a thread; there must be one. Where shall I look for it?" "How did you manage with our surly Abraham last night? would he let you stay?" asked Aaron, when I joined the family of two. "He was not very surly; I managed him considerably better than I did his beautiful sister," I said. He proceeded to question me of the night-events. I told only of the visit to the dead, leaving out the conversations preceding the event. "An unwarrantable proceeding of Abraham's," said Aaron. "And that room, so cold, as they always keep such rooms. I expect to hear that Miss Axtell is much worse to-day," was Sophie's comment, when I had told all that I thought it right to tell. Aaron went away early in the afternoon, to visit some parishioners who lived among the highlands, where the snows of winter had made it difficult to go. Sophie said, she would read to me. My piece of "knitting-work" was still unfinished, and I, sitting near a window looking churchward, knitted, whilst Sophie pushed back from her low, cool brow those bands of softly purplish hair, and read to me something that strangely soothed my militant spirit, lifted me out of my present self, carried me whither breezes of charity stirred the foliage of the world, and opened sweet flower-blooms on dark, unpromising trees. I had been wafted up to a height where I thought I should forever keep in memory the view I saw, and feel charity toward all erring mortals as long as life endured, when a noise came to my ears. I knew it instantly, before I could catch my dropping stitch and look out. It was the first stroke on hard Mother Earth, the first knocking sound, that said, "We've come to ask one more grave of you." Sophie did not seem to have heard: she went on with her reading. I looked out. Two men were in the church-yard: one held a measuring-line in his hand, the other a spade. The one with the spade went on to mark the hard winter-beaten turf,--the knotted grass he cut through. I saw him describe the outline of a grave,--the other standing there, silently looking on. When the grave was marked, the one wielding the spade looked up at the silent looker-on, who bowed his head, as if to say, "It is right." Then he began to strike deeper, to hit the stones under the sod. "What is it?" asked Sophie, looking up, for now she heard.