But when after some little time he actually came out of the narrow avenue and looked down, his heart misgave him, for some one was already sitting there on his low and solitary seat beneath the cypresses. He stood hesitating, gazing steadily and yet half vacantly at the motionless figure, and in a while a face was lifted in his direction, and undisconcerted eyes calmly surveyed him. ‘I am afraid,’ called Lawford rather nervously—‘I hope I am not intruding?’ ‘Not at all, not at all,’ said the stranger. ‘I have no privileges here; at least as yet.’ Lawford again hesitated, then slowly advanced. ‘It’s astonishingly quiet and beautiful,’ he said. The stranger turned his head to glance over the fields. ‘Yes, it is, very,’ he replied. There was the faintest accent, a little drawl of unfriendliness in the remark. ‘You often sit here?’ Lawford persisted. The stranger raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh yes, often.’ He smiled. ‘It is my own modest fashion of attending divine service. The congregation is rapt.’ ‘_My_ visits,’ said Lawford, ‘have been very few—in fact, so far as I know, I have only once been here before.’ ‘I envy you the novelty.’ There was again the same faint unmistakable antagonism in voice and attitude; and yet so deep was the relief in talking to a fellow creature who hadn’t the least suspicion of anything unusual in his appearance that Lawford was extremely disinclined to turn back. He made another effort—for conversation with strangers had always been a difficulty to him—and advanced towards the seat. ‘You mustn’t please let me intrude upon you,’ he said, ‘but really I am very interested in this queer old place. Perhaps you would tell me something of its history?’ He sat down. His companion moved slowly to the other side of the broken gravestone. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he replied, picking his way as it were from word to word, ‘it’s “history,” as people call it, does not interest me in the least. After all, it’s not _when_ a thing is, but _what_ it is, that much matters. What this is’—he glanced, with head bent, across the shadowy stones, ‘is pretty evident. Of course, age has its charms.’ ‘And is this very old?’ ‘Oh yes, it’s old right enough, as things go; but even age, perhaps, is mainly an affair of the imagination. There’s a tombstone near that little old hawthorn, and there are two others side by side under the wall, still even legibly late seventeenth century. That’s pretty good weathering.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Of course, the church itself is centuries older, drenched with age. But she’s still sleep-walking while these old tombstones dream. Glow-worms and crickets are not such bad bedfellows.’ ‘What interested me most, I think,’ said Lawford haltingly, ‘was this.’ He pointed with his stick to the grave at his feet. ‘Ah, yes, Sabathier’s,’ said the stranger; ‘I know his peculiar history almost by heart.’