He then started off in the same direction which Woodward had taken, and Grace, having looked after him with considerable indignation on her own part and considerable apprehension on behalf of Woodward, took up her pitcher and proceeded home. She now felt herself much disturbed, and experienced that state of mind which is often occasioned by the enunciation of that which is known to be truth, but which, at the same time, is productive of pain to the conscience, especially when that conscience begins to abandon the field and fly from its duty. Woodward, as he had intended, preferred the open and common road home, although it was much longer, rather than return by the old green lane, which was rugged and uneven, and full of deep ruts, dangerous inequalities, and stumps of old trees, all of which rendered it not only a disagreeable, but a dangerous, path by night. Having got out upon the highway, which here, and until he reached near home, was, indeed, solemn-looking and lonely, not a habitation except the haunted house being visible for upwards of two miles, he proceeded on his way, thinking of his interview with Grace Davoren. The country on each side of him was nearly a desert; a gray ruin, some of whose standing and isolated fragments assumed, to the excited imagination of the terrified peasants as they passed it by night, the appearance of supernatural beings, stood to the left, in the centre of an antiquated church-yard, in which there had not been a corpse buried for nearly half a century--a circumstance which always invests a graveyard with a more fearful character. As Woodward gazed at these still and lonely relics of the dead, upon which the faint rays of the moon gleamed with a spectral and melancholy light, he could not help feeling that the sight itself, and the associations connected with it, were calculated to fill weak minds with strong feelings of supernatural terror. His, however, was not a mind accessible to any such impressions; but at the same time he could make allowance for them among those who had seldom any other notions to guide them on such subjects than those of superstition and ignorance.