present?"

"If he wishes," Bobby answered, a trifle amused at Robinson's obvious
fancy of a collusion between Paredes and himself.

Robinson jerked his head toward the window.

"I've been watching the preparations out there. I guess when he's laid
away you'll be thinking about having the will read."

"No hurry," Bobby answered with a quick intake of breath.

"I suppose not," Robinson sneered, "since everybody knows well enough
what's in it."

Bobby arose. Robinson still sneered.

"You'll be at the grave--as chief mourner?"

Bobby walked from the room. He hadn't cared to reply. He feared, as it
was, that he had let slip his increased self-doubt. He put on his coat
and hat and left the house. The raw cold, the year's first omen of
winter, made his blood run quicker, forced into his mind a cleansing
stimulation. But almost immediately even that prophylactic was denied
him. With his direction a matter of indifference, chance led him into the
thicket at the side of the house. He had walked some distance. The
underbrush had long interposed a veil between him and the Cedars above
whose roofs smoke wreathed in the still air like fantastic figures
weaving a shroud to lower over the time-stained, melancholy walls. For
once he was grateful to the forest because it had forbidden him to glance
perpetually back at that dismal and pensive picture. Then he became aware
of twigs hastily lopped off, of bushes bent and torn, of the uncovering,
through these careless means, of an old path. Simultaneously there
reached his ears the scraping of metal implements in the soft soil, the
dull thud of earth falling regularly. He paused, listening. The labour of
the men was given an uncouth rhythm by their grunting expulsions of
breath. Otherwise the nature of their industry and its surroundings had
imposed upon them a silence, in itself beast-like and unnatural.

At last a harsh voice came to Bobby. Its brevity pointed the previous
dumbness of the speaker:

"Deep enough!"

And Bobby turned and hurried back along the roughly restored path, as if
fleeing from an immaterial thing suddenly quickened with the power of
accusation.

He could picture the fresh oblong excavation in the soil of the family
burial ground. He could see where the men had had to tear bushes from
among the graves in order to insert their tools. There was an ironical
justice in the condition of the old cemetery. It had received no
interment since the death of Kathe