s of the spades on the completed mound beat
into his brain the end. The workmen wandered off through the woods. From
a distance the harsh voice of one of them came back:

"I don't want to dig again in such a place. People don't seem dead
there."

Robinson tried to laugh.

"That man's wise," he said to the doctor. "If Paredes spoke of this
cemetery as being full of ghosts I could understand him."

The doctor's deep bass answered thoughtfully:

"Paredes is probably right. The man has a special sense, but I have felt
it myself. The Cedars and the forest are full of things that seem to
whisper, things that one never sees. Such things might have an excuse
for evil."

"Let's get out of it," Robinson said gruffly.

Katherine withdrew her hand. Bobby reached for it again, but she seemed
not to notice. She walked ahead of him along the path, her shoulders a
trifle bent. Bobby caught up with her.

"Katherine!" he said.

"Don't talk to me, Bobby."

He looked closer. He saw that she was crying at last. Tears stained her
cheeks. Her lips were strange to him in the distortion of a grief that
seeks to control itself. He slackened his pace and let her walk ahead.
He followed with a sort of awe that there should have been grief for
Silas Blackburn after all. He blamed himself because his own eyes were
not moist.

Back of him he heard the murmuring conversation of the doctor and the
district attorney. Strangely it made him sorry that Robinson should have
been more impressed than Howells by the doctor's beliefs.

They stepped into the clearing. The wind had dissipated the smoke shroud.
It was no longer low over the roofs. Against the forest and the darker
clouds the house had a stark appearance. It was like a frame from which
the flesh has fallen.

The black wagon had gone. The Cedars was left alone to the solution of
its mystery.

Paredes, Graham, and Rawlins waited for them in the hall. There was
nothing to say. Paredes placed with a delicate accuracy fresh logs upon
the fire. He arose, flecking the wood dust from his hands.

"How cold it will be here," he mused, "how impossible of entrance when
the house is left as empty as the woods to those who only go unseen!"

Bobby saw Katherine's shoulders shake. She had dried her eyes, but in her
face was expressed an aversion for solitude, a desire for any company,
even that of the man she disliked and feared.

Robinson took Rawlins to the library for another futile consul