phen looked on admiringly, and said in a half-
conscious way, the half-consciousness being shown in the implication:

'You are not afraid of the crypt?'

'Not a bit! In my father's church there was a crypt, and I was in it
several times.' As he spoke the memory of the last time he had been
there swept over him. He seemed to see again the many lights, held in
hands that were never still, making a grim gloom where the black shadows
were not; to hear again the stamp and hurried shuffle of the many feet,
as the great oak coffin was borne by the struggling mass of men down the
steep stairway and in through the narrow door . . . And then the hush
when voices faded away; and the silence seemed a real thing, as for a
while he stood alone close to the dead father who had been all in all to
him. And once again he seemed to feel the recall to the living world of
sorrow and of light, when his inert hand was taken in the strong loving
one of Squire Norman.

He paused and drew back.

'Why don't you go on?' she asked, surprised.

He did not like to tell her then. Somehow, it seemed out of place. He
had often spoken to her of his father, and she had always been a
sympathetic listener; but here, at the entrance of the grim vault, he did
not wish to pain her with his own thoughts of sorrow and all the terrible
memories which the similarity of the place evoked. And even whilst he
hesitated there came to him a thought so laden with pain and fear that he
rejoiced at the pause which gave it to him in time. It was in that very
crypt that Stephen's mother had been buried, and had they two gone in, as
they had intended, the girl might have seen her mother's coffin as he had
seen his father's, but under circumstances which made him shiver. He had
been, as he said, often in the crypt at Carstone; and well he knew the
sordidness of the chamber of death. His imagination was alive as well as
his memory; he shuddered, not for himself, but for Stephen. How could he
allow the girl to suffer in such a way as she might, as she infallibly
would, if it were made apparent to her in such a brutal way? How
pitiful, how meanly pitiful, is the aftermath of death. Well he
remembered how many a night he woke in an agony, thinking of how his
father lay in that cold, silent, dust-strewn vault, in the silence and
the dark, with never a ray of light or hope or love! Gone, abandoned,
forgotten by all, save perhaps one heart which bled . . . He would