g-handled spades. After the
first shock of surprise, I flatter myself I was both cool and quiet.
We went in single file between the rows of headstones, and although,
when I found myself last, I had an instinctive desire to keep looking
back over my shoulder, I found that, the first uneasiness past, a
cemetery at night is much the same as any other country place, filled
with vague shadows and unexpected noises. Once, indeed--but Mr.
Jamieson said it was an owl, and I tried to believe him.

In the shadow of the Armstrong granite shaft we stopped. I think the
doctor wanted to send me back.

"It's no place for a woman," I heard him protesting angrily. But the
detective said something about witnesses, and the doctor only came over
and felt my pulse.

"Anyhow, I don't believe you're any worse off here than you would be in
that nightmare of a house," he said finally, and put his coat on the
steps of the shaft for me to sit on.

There is an air of finality about a grave: one watches the earth thrown
in, with the feeling that this is the end. Whatever has gone before,
whatever is to come in eternity, that particular temple of the soul has
been given back to the elements from which it came. Thus, there is a
sense of desecration, of a reversal of the everlasting fitness of
things, in resurrecting a body from its mother clay. And yet that
night, in the Casanova churchyard, I sat quietly by, and watched Alex
and Mr. Jamieson steaming over their work, without a single qualm,
except the fear of detection.

The doctor kept a keen lookout, but no one appeared. Once in a while
he came over to me, and gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

"I never expected to come to this," he said once. "There's one thing
sure--I'll not be suspected of complicity. A doctor is generally
supposed to be handier at burying folks than at digging them up."

The uncanny moment came when Alex and Jamieson tossed the spades on the
grass, and I confess I hid my face. There was a period of stress, I
think, while the heavy coffin was being raised. I felt that my
composure was going, and, for fear I would shriek, I tried to think of
something else--what time Gertrude would reach Halsey--anything but the
grisly reality that lay just beyond me on the grass.

And then I heard a low exclamation from the detective and I felt the
pressure of the doctor's fingers on my arm.

"Now, Miss Innes," he said gently. "If you will come over--"

I held o