“I knew it!” she cried, “and Aunt Connie used to tell Fay and me all about it evenings when we were babies. We thought it must be a mean sort of a place, but she seemed real fond of it, and I would know it anywhere. I’ll go right there, and look up that register for myself. Charing Cross, Mr Steinherz said--that’s somewhere down town, I know--and Bradcross is a suburb, so I guess it can’t be far away. I’ll take that message about Félicia’s shoes to the store myself, instead of having Pringle go, and then I’ll go way down there without any other person’s knowing. I _will_ find out whether it’s a dream or not.” CHAPTER IV. HIT AND MISS. “Oh, the dear cunning things! They’re just too sweet for words!” Maimie was standing before the gate of St Mary Windicotes churchyard, contemplating, with a rapt expression of ecstasy, the two huge laurel-wreathed skulls, carved in stone, now hideously blackened with time, which crowned the high gate-posts. The clerk’s wife, unaware that in seeing these skulls the visitor was fulfilling one of her dearest and creepiest early hopes, felt that the grisly objects were not being treated with proper respect. “They ain’t no figures of fun, miss. It’s what we all ’ave to come to,” she observed reprovingly. “Not but what old Mr Cowell opposite did say, when there was a talk of takin’ of ’em down and puttin’ up common stone balls like in their place, ‘Never a foot do I set within the church-door again if them death’s-’eads is took down,’ says he. ‘I’ve see ’em all my life as boy and man, and the church wouldn’t be the church without ’em.’ But there’s no call for strangers to be a-lovin’ of ’em, but only to remember their latter end, as may be sooner than they think.” They were now walking up the path, itself flagged with gravestones, which led to the church-door, and Maimie noticed with something of a shudder the embattled rows of monuments on either hand, of all sizes and shapes and all manner of deviation from the perpendicular, and the ranges of displaced stones which lined the churchyard walls. For the moment she felt that she hated the place. How could people in their senses have had a wedding there? It was bound to turn out badly. “And in that very pew there, as is now cleared away”--the clerk’s wife was concluding with much impressiveness a speech containing valuable historical information--“my mother see with her own eyes the great Dook of Wellington sit hevery Trinity Monday, for to ’ear the appointed sermon.”