128

“There’s Matt Carey’s grave. He had everything he wanted, and he wasn’t young. Now-a-days he’d have been driving in his automobile killing old women and chickens, or tarpoon fishing down ’n Florida letting the world go rip, or full of neur—what do they call it—that thing that gets on their nerves and makes crazy old men of them at forty—I’ve forgotten. He didn’t. He took up a gun and died like a lion, and he was a middle-aged business man. No one remembers him, I do believe, except, maybe me, clean forgotten—and yet he helped to put a brick into the only monument worth ten cents that America has got—The War.

“And some northern people would say ‘nice sort of brick, seeing he was fighting on the wrong side.’ Wrong side or right side he was fighting for something else than his own hand. That’s the point.”

She closed up her lips and they went on. Phyl found her father’s grave in a quiet spot where the live-oaks stood, the long grey moss hanging from their branches.

Miss Pinckney, having pointed out the grave, strayed off, leaving the girl to herself.

The gloomy, strange-looking trees daunted Phyl, and the grave, too young yet to have a headstone, drew her towards it, yet repelled her.

It was like meeting in a dream some one she had loved and who had turned into a stranger in a strange place.

Just as Charleston had dimmed Ireland in her 129 mind as a bright light dims a lesser light, so had some influence come between her and the memory of her father. That memory was just as distinct as ever, but grief had died from it, as though Time had been at work on it for years and years.

129

The Phyl who had stepped out of the south-bound express and the girl of this morning were the same in mind and body, but in soul and outlook they had changed and were changing as though the air of the south had some magic in it, some food that had always been denied her and which was necessary for her full being.

Miss Pinckney returned from her wanderings amongst the graves and they turned to the gate.

“It used to seem strange to me coming here when I was a girl,” said she. “It always seemed as if I was come to visit people who could never come to see me. I used to pity them, but one gets older and one gets wiser, and I fancy it’s they that pity us, if they can see us 

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