“I have had nothing done to this place since you left,” said the rector, breaking the heavy pause. “I thought that perhaps your wish would coincide with mine; that you would give orders to have these precincts cleared and levelled, and thrown in with the rest of the grounds, so that even its unhappy memory might die out among us. Over those new graves in the churchyard the sod is growing green again; and in the hearts of our poor ignorant village folk, resignation to the will of Providence, and repentance and shame for their cowardly turbulence, has taken the place of all angry feelings. I may tell you now, David, how grateful they all are for your not pursuing them with punishment.” “Pah!” interrupted Sir David with impatient contempt. “What were the wretches to me—since I had heard she had escaped! What care I but to find her again!” The parson halted disconcerted. Sir David had abruptly left his side to walk rapidly up to the gates and examine them. Then he turned. His look and demeanour had something of the singularity of former days. And from his distance: “Rase these walls!” he cried. “Sweep these memories!... Have I not just said to you that memory is all that I have left! This wall shall be built up, these gates hung again; and no hand but mine shall touch what remains of those beds that she tended and planted. No feet but mine shall tread the paths her feet have pressed. Here shall all lie as secret and desolate as my life without her.—Let us go!” Worthy Dr. Tutterville walked on in silence. His warm heart was too sincerely grieved for his eccentric companion to resent his present attitude; at the same time he was conscious of a humanly-irritated regret that the present form of eccentricity should not have manifested itself a little earlier. Presently Sir David took up the thread of the conversation where the rector had left it. “So your good parishioners are grateful for my indulgence,” he said, with something approaching a sneer. “Let them thank the Providence to whom, as you tell me, they are beginning to be resigned, that He protected the object of their hatred from them! Had I not received the keeper’s word that she was safe and sound, I would have left no stone unturned to make every scoundrel of them know the full penalties of the law touching assault and housebreaking. They complained of poison ... they would have learned something of gallows! But their offence to me was not worth the trouble their punishment would entail. She escaped—let them be!” “These are hard words,” said the parson disturbed, and he was about to add all the excuses he had already found for his flock in the trouble they had themselves endured and in the evil influence of Margery among them, when David interrupted again: “I am a hard man, it seems! Well, I need be, to endure life.” And Dr. Tutterville wisely held his peace.