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The sad-looking, yellow-topped cypress, which only seems to feel quite at home in country burying-grounds, had kindly spread itself like a coverlet over the grave, which already looked like a very old grave; and the headstone was leaning a little, not to be out of the fashion of the rest. I traced again the words of old Colonel Haverford's pompous epitaph, and idly read some others.
"Of what it is that they want more than anything else in the world." "Children-sons," put in Mrs. Mackenzie. She was a robust, big woman with kindly eyes, and she was childless. "Women!" called Toots Hayden. She was still posed, but she had stopped playing. Mrs. Haverford's eyes rested on her a moment, disapprovingly. "What do you say, Natalie?" Audrey asked. "I hadn't thought about it.
I've heard that her folks used to live here; but nobody can remember them, and she used to wander about; and once before she was here, a good while ago; but this last time she came was nine years ago; one stormy night she came across the ferry, and scared them to death, looking in at the window like a ghost. She said she used to live here in Colonel Haverford's time.
"I haven't seen her recently," she said coldly. "Nobody has. I do think she might have seen her clergyman. There is a time when only the church can give us the comfort we need, my dear." And whatever Mrs. Haverford's faults, she meant that quite simply. "And you say Clay knew?" "It's rather likely he would. They were golfing together, weren't they, when that caddie was hurt?"
Not that there was any thing covered and hidden necessarily; but it was the quiet undertone in the house which had grown to be so old, and had known the magnificent living of Colonel Haverford's time, and afterward the struggles of poor gentlemen and women, who had hardly warmed its walls with their pitiful fires, and shivering, hungry lives; then the long procession of travellers who had been sheltered there in its old tavern days; finally, my cousin Matthew and his wife, who had made it their home, when, with all their fortune, they felt empty-handed, and as if their lives were ended, because their only son had died.
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