They moved cautiously hand in hand between the dark grassy mounds, the heavy dew soaking their shoes. Suddenly Phyllis stopped, her fingers tightening, and a delicious thrill of excitement quivering through her. “There it is. Look!” she whispered. They advanced a step or two, and found themselves confronted by a gloomy oblong hole, and an ugly heap of ejected earth. “Oh, how awful it do look, doesn’t it, Luke darling?” she murmured, clinging closely to him. He put his arm round the girl’s waist, and together, under the vast dome of the starlit sky, the two warm-blooded youthful creatures contemplated the resting-place of the generations. “It’s queer to think,” remarked Luke pensively, “that just as we stand looking on this, so, when we’re dead, other people will stand over our graves, and we know nothing and care nothing!” “They dug this out this morning,” said Phyllis, more concerned with the immediate drama than with general meditations of mortality. “Old Ben Fursling’s son did it, and my father helped him in his dinner-hour. They said another hot day like this would make the earth too hard.” Luke moved forward, stepping cautiously over the dark upturned soil. He paused at the extreme edge of the gaping recess. “What’ll you give me,” he remarked turning to his companion, “if I climb down into it?” “Don’t talk like that, Luke,” protested the girl. “’Tisn’t lucky to say them things. I wouldn’t give you nothing. I’d run straight away and leave you.” The young man knelt down at the edge of the hole, and with the elegant cane he had carried in his hand all that afternoon, fumbled profanely in its dusky depths. Suddenly, to the girl’s absolute horror, he scrambled round, and deliberately let himself down into the pit. She breathed a sigh of unutterable relief, when she observed his head and shoulders still above the level of the ground. “It’s all right,” he whispered, “they’ve left it half-finished. I suppose they’ll do the rest on Monday.” “Please get out of it, Luke,” the girl pleaded. “I don’t like to see you there. It make me think you’re standing on Jimmy Pringle.” Luke obeyed her and emerged from the earth almost as rapidly as he had descended. When he was once more by her side, Phyllis gave a little half-deliberate shudder of exquisite terror. “Fancy,” she whispered, clinging tightly to him, “if you was to drag me to that hole, and put me down there! I think I should die of fright.” This conscious playing with her own girlish fears was a very interesting characteristic in Phyllis Santon. Luke had recognized something of the sort in her before, and now he wondered vaguely, as he glanced from the obscurity of Nevilton Churchyard to the brilliant galaxy of luminous splendour surrounding the constellation Pegasus, whether she really wanted him to take her at her word. His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of voices at the inn-door. They both held their breath, listening intently.