would have longed to love. He knew he
would never marry; he could not marry plainness, and beauty would have
none of him; but he did not want to miss everything and he had moments
when he was very bitter and rebellious because he felt he must miss it
forever.

He went straight to Isabel Temple's grave in the remote shore field of
his farm. Isabel Temple had lived and died eighty years ago. She had
been very lovely, very wilful, very fond of playing with the hearts of
men. She had married William Temple, the brother of his
great-grandfather, and as she stood in her white dress beside her
bridegroom, at the conclusion of the wedding ceremony, a jilted lover,
crazed by despair, had entered the house and shot her dead. She had
been buried in the shore field, where a square space had been dyked
off in the centre for a burial lot because the church was then so far
away. With the passage of years the lot had grown up so thickly with
fir and birch and wild cherry that it looked like a compact grove. A
winding path led through it to its heart where Isabel Temple's grave
was, thickly overgrown with long, silken, pale green grass. Roger
hurried along the path and sat down on the big grey boulder by the
grave, looking about him with a long breath of delight. How
lovely--and witching--and unearthly it was here. Little ferns were
growing in the hollows and cracks of the big boulder where clay had
lodged. Over Isabel Temple's crooked, lichened gravestone hung a young
wild cherry in its delicate bloom. Above it, in a little space of sky
left by the slender tree tops, was a young moon. It was too dark here
after all to read Wordsworth, but that did not matter. The place, with
its moist air, its tang of fir balsam, was like a perfumed room where
a man might dream dreams and see visions. There was a soft murmur of
wind in the boughs over him, and the faraway moan of the sea on the
bar crept in. Roger surrendered himself utterly to the charm of the
place. When he entered that grove, he had left behind the realm of
daylight and things known and come into the realm of shadow and
mystery and enchantment. Anything might happen--anything might be
true.

Eighty long years had come and gone, but Isabel Temple, thus cruelly
torn from life at the moment when it had promised her most, did not
even yet rest calmly in her grave; such at least was the story, and
Roger believed it. It was in his blood to believe it. The Temples were
a superstitious