I went down the hillside and lay in the shadow of the
tasselled larches, trying to convince myself that I had not hoped to
see the brown lady, if it were a lady I had seen, bending over the
stones of the old burial-ground.
One day the silence of the woods was broken by the sound of a mason's
hammer, and on making inquiry from a passing workman--his hodman
probably--I learned that on opening the vault it had been discovered
that there was not room for another coffin. But no enlargement of the
vault was necessary; a couple of more shelves was all that would be
wanted for many a year to come. His meaning was not to be
mistaken--when two more shelves had been added there would be room for
my brothers, myself, and my sister, but the next generation would have
to order that a further excavation be made in the hill or look out for
a new burial-ground. He stood looking at me, and I watched for a
moment a fine young man whose eyes were pale as the landscape, and I
wondered if he expected me to say that I was glad that things had
turned out very well.... The sound of the mason's hammer got upon my
nerves, and feeling the wood to be no longer a place for meditation, I
wandered round the shore as far as the old boat-house, wondering how
it was that the words of a simple peasant could have succeeded in
producing such a strange revulsion of feeling in me.
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