There were many men in Wilton who had looked at their children’s graves, little banks of green turf ranged on the hill-side where the winds wailed in winter like the mythical spirits of the damned. A gaunt, graceless place, this cemetery, a place where the insignificant dead lived only in the few notches of a mason’s chisel upon stone. A high yellow brick wall encompassed its many acres. Immediately within the iron gates stood a tin chapel, a building that might have stood for the Temple of Ugliness, the deity of commercialized towns. On either side of the main walk a row of sickly aspens lifted their slender branches against a hueless sky.

To the man and the woman who stood in one corner of this burial-ground, looking down upon a grave that had been but lately banked with turf, there was an infinite and sordid sadness in the scene. Two graves, not ten yards away, had been filled in but the day before, and the grass was caked and stained with yellow clay. Near them stood the black wooden shelter used by the officiating priest in dirty weather. A few wreaths, sodden, rain-drenched, the flowers already turning brown, seemed to mock the hands that had placed them there.

White headstones everywhere; a few obelisks; a few plain wooden crosses; rank mounds where no name lingered after death. Ever and again the thin clink of the hopeless chapel bell. A gray sky merging into a wet, gray landscape. In the valley—Wilton, prostrate under mist and smoke.

James Murchison, standing bareheaded before Gwen’s grave, gazed at the wet turf with the eyes of a man who saw more beneath it than mere lifeless clay. There was nothing of rebellion in the pose of the tall figure—rather, the slight stoop of one poring over some rare book with the reverence of him who reads to learn.

For Catherine there was no consciousness of penance as she stood beside him, silent and distant-eyed. Her hands were clasped together under her cloak. She stood as one waiting, heart heavy, yet ready to awake to the new life that opens even for those who grieve.

There were not a few such groups scattered about this upland burial-ground, colorless, subdued figures seen dimly through the drizzling mist of rain. Quite near to Murchison a working-man was arranging a few flowers in a large white jam-pot; the grave, by the name on the headstone, was the grave of his wife. A few children, who had wandered up to see some funeral, were playing “touch wood” between the aspens of the main walk. There was an irresponsible callousness in their shrill, slum-hardened voices. To them this place of Death was but a field to play in.

Murchison had turned from Gwen’s grave, and was looking at his wife. There seemed some bond more sacred between them now that they had shared both life and death in the body of their child.

“You are cold, dear.”

He touched her cheek with his hand as he turned up the collar of her cloak. Her hair was wet and a-glisten with the rain, her face cold like the face of one fresh from the breath of an autumn sea.

“Only my skin.”

“The wind is keen, though. It is time we turned back home.”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye, my child.”

He spoke the words in a whisper as they moved away from the corner.

Before them, seen dimly through a haze of rain, lay the colliery town, a vague splash of darkness in the valley. Here and there a tall chimney stood trailing smoke, or the faint glow of a fire gave a thin opalescence to the shell of mist. Sounds, faint and far, yet full of the significance of labor, drifted up the bleak slopes of the hillside, like the sounds from ships sailing a foggy sea. The rattle of a train, the shriek of a steam-whistle, the slow strokes of some great clock striking the hour.

James Murchison’s eyes were fixed upon this town beside the pit mouths, this pool of poverty and toil, where the eddies of effort never ceased upon the surface. It was strange to him, this colliery town, and yet familiar. Always would his manhood yearn towards it because of the dear dead, even though its memories were hateful to him, full of the bitterness of ignominy and pain.

Gwen’s death had come to Murchison as a sudden silence, a strange void in the hurrying entities of life. It was as though the passing of this child had changed the phenomena of existence for him, and given a new rhythm to the pulse of Time. He had become aware of a new setting to life, even as a man who has walked the same road day by day discovers on some winter dawn a fresh and unearthly beauty in the scene. He felt an unsolved newness in his being, a solemnity such as those who have looked upon the dead must feel. And no strong nature can pass through such a phase without creating inward energy and power. Sorrow, like winter, may be but a season of repose, troubled and drear perhaps, but moving towards the miracle of spring.

Wilton cemetery, with its zinc-roofed chapel, its yellow walls and iron gates, lay behind them, while the dim horizon ran in a gray blur along the hills. Husband and wife walked for a time in silence, for each had a burden of deep thought to bear.

It was the man who spoke first, quietly, and with restraint, and yet with something of the fierce spirit of an outcast Cain visible upon his face.

“I have been thinking of what I said to you last night.”

She was looking at him with a brave clearness of the eyes.

“I suppose sensible people would call such a venture—mad.”

“We are often strongest, dear, when we are most mad.”

He swung on beside her, his eyes at gaze.

“The madness of a forlorn hope. No, it is not that. I have not any of the impudence of the adventurer. It is something more solemn, more grim, more for a final end.”

“Beloved, I understand.”

“Are you not afraid for me?”

“No, no.”

She put her hand under his arm.

“God give us both courage, dear,” she said.

They had reached the outskirts of Wilton, and the ugliness of the place was less visible in these outworks of the town. The streets had something of the quaintness of antiquity about them, for this was a part of the real Wilton, an old English townlet that had been gripped and strangled by the decapod of the pits.

“About your mother’s money, Kate.”

The rumble of a passing van compelled silence for a moment.

“You must retain the whole control.”

“I?”

“Yes.”

He heard a woman’s unwillingness in her voice.

“It is my wish, dear. I shall need a certain sum to start with, but my life-insurance can be made a security for that.”

“James!”

Her face reproached him.

“Are we so little married that what is mine is not yours also?”

“It is because you are my wife, Kate, that I consider these things. Your mother was wise, though her instructions do not flatter me. Legally, I cannot touch a single penny.”

She looked troubled, and a little impatient.

“I shall hate the money—if—no, I don’t mean that. But, dear,” and she drew very close to him in the twilight of the streets, “it will make no difference. You will not feel—?”

“Feel, Kate?”

“That it is mine, and not yours. You know, dear, what I mean. I don’t want to think—to think that you will feel as though you had to ask.”

They looked, man and wife, into each other’s eyes.

“I shall ask, Kate, because—”

“Because?”

“You are what you are. It will not hurt me to remember that the stuff is yours.”

Now, quite an hour ago a battered and moth-eaten c............