There came a day after long years, and June smiled as of yore, and the scythe of Jonas Lethbridge smoothed the grassy graveyard, even as the scythe of Time filled it.  He took a gloomy pride in the place; and while his father, who now slept beneath, had been content to dig deep and bury well, this silent man passed his abstracted days among the graves, and made the face of the little churchyard fair to see.

Few problems troubled him; yet upon this hour in young summer he was faced with a difficulty.  He paused, looked with down-drawn brows at a faint path worn in the grass between certain tombs.  It was a way trodden there by a woman’s feet, and it led—not to the grave of Amos Thorn, but to a little mound near it, where the woodman’s son slept beside him.

“Haven’t spoke a word to her since her flinged me over, an’ never thought to; but ’tis my duty,” the sexton reflected, “an’ my duty I must do.  I could set sticks across, but she’d only think I was ’feared of her.  For that matter, so I be.”

Opportunity offered within the hour.  The man p. 183mowed, and the blackbirds sang.  From an ancient tomb, long sunk out of straightness, came a tapping where a thrush broke a snail and feasted upon it.  The air danced, and the scythe’s strokes rose and fell regularly, like the deep breath of a sleeper.

Then came a woman, and her feet pressed the grasses where Lethbridge had too often marked their passing.  His face grew white, his brows frowned, and he put down his scythe and came forward.  Dinah saw him, and hesitated and stood still.  A little bunch of purple columbines fell out of her hand, and she bent and picked them up.

“Mrs. Thorn,” said the man, “I must ax you to go around t’other way to your graves in future.  I won’t have ’e trapsing about here.  You’m wearing the young grass away.  See how bad it do look.  An’ if you’d only let your child’s grave alone, the turves would jine suent and smooth; but you’m always putting in jam-jars wi’ flowers in ’em, an’ planting things that die, an’ worrying the place so cruel that no grass can grow.  I don’t want to say nought to hurt your mother’s heart, but the grave will never look seemly the way you treat it; and I shall be blamed.”

She stood in a dream to hear his voice again.  “If tears could make it grow—”

“Tears!  ’Tis a poor, feeble sorrow tears will drown.”

p. 184“Men an’ women be different.  Tears do soften the cutting edge to us ............