n, miserable visit, which, because of the very misery it involved,
appeared to Ellinor to be an imperative duty.

Dixon and she talked together as she sat making a catalogue one evening
in the old low-browed library; the casement windows were open into the
garden, and the May showers had brought out the scents of the new-leaved
sweetbriar bush just below. Beyond the garden hedge the grassy meadows
sloped away down to the liver; the Parsonage was so much raised that,
sitting in the house, you could see over the boundary hedge. Men with
instruments were busy in the meadow. Ellinor, pausing in her work, asked
Dixon what they were doing.

"Them's the people for the new railway," said he. "Nought would satisfy
the Hamley folk but to have a railway all to themselves--coaches isn't
good enough now-a-days."

He spoke with a tone of personal offence natural to a man who had passed
all his life among horses, and considered railway-engines as their
despicable rivals, conquering only by stratagem.

By-and-by Ellinor passed on to a subject the consideration of which she
had repeatedly urged upon Dixon, and entreated him to come and form one
of their household at East Chester. He was growing old, she thought
older even in looks and feelings than in years, and she would make him
happy and comfortable in his declining years if he would but come and
pass them under her care. The addition which Mr. Ness's bequest made to
her income would enable her to do not only this, but to relieve Miss
Monro of her occupation of teaching; which, at the years she had arrived
at, was becoming burdensome. When she proposed the removal to Dixon he
shook his head.

"It's not that I don't thank you, and kindly, too; but I'm too old to go
chopping and changing."

"But it would be no change to come back to me, Dixon," said Ellinor.

"Yes, it would. I were born i' Hamley, and it's i' Hamley I reckon to
die."

On her urging him a little more, it came out that he had a strong feeling
that if he did not watch the spot where the dead man lay buried, the
whole would be discovered; and that this dread of his had often poisoned
the pleasure of his visit to East Chester.

"I don't rightly know how it is, for I sometimes think if it wasn't for
you, missy, I should be glad to have made it all clear before I go; and
yet at times I dream, or it comes into my head as I lie awake with the
rheumatics, that some one is there, digging; or that I hear 'em cutt