.

"I'm no so ill as I--I seem," he panted, "but that's neither here--nor
there."

This was their greeting. Round them the grass was littered by old picnic
papers, and this vulgar marring of the woodland glade was curiously akin
to the character of this crucial interview between them, for the beauty
of its inner import was overlaid with much that was common and garish. A
rude bench had been knocked together by some picnicker of the past, and
on this Bates was fain to sit down to regain his breath. Sissy stood
near him, plucking at some coloured leaves she had picked up in her
restlessness.

"You think of going back to the old place," she said, because he could
not speak.

"Aye."

"Miss Bates is keeping pretty well?"--this in conventional tone that was
oddly mortised into the passionate working of her mind.

"Oh, aye."

"Why wouldn't you sell it and live in a town?"

"It's the only air there I can be breathing," said he; the confession
was wrung from him by his present struggle for breath. "I'm not fit for
a town."

"I hear them saying down at the hotel that you're awfully ill."

"It's not mortal, the doctor says."

"You'll need someone to take care of you, Mr. Bates."

"Oh, I'll get that."

He spoke as if setting aside the subject of his welfare with impatience,
and she let it drop; but because he was yet too breathless to speak his
mind, she began again:

"I don't mind if you don't sell, for I don't want to get any money."

"Oh, but ye can sell when I'm gone; it'll be worth more then than now.
I'm just keeping a place I can breathe in, ye understand, as long as I
go on breathing."

She pulled the leaves in her hand, tearing them lengthwise and
crosswise.

"What I want--to ask of ye now is--what I want to ask ye first is a
solemn question. Do ye know where your father's corpse--is laid?"

"Yes, I know," she said. "He didn't care anything about cemeteries,
father didn't."

He looked at her keenly, and there was a certain stern setting of his
strong lower jaw. His words were quick: "Tell on."

"'Twas you that made me do it," said she, sullenly.

"Do what? What did ye do?"

"I buried my father."

"Did ye set Saul to do it?"

"No; what should I have to do asking a man like Saul?"

"Lassie, lassie! it's no for me to condemn ye, nor maybe for the dead
either, for he was whiles a hard father to you, but I wonder your own
woman's heart didn't misgive ye."

Perhaps, for all he knew, it had mi