fashion most people were clever—even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body. He turned languidly to the small cross-shaped stone on the other side: 

 ‘Here lies the body of Ann Hard, who died in child-bed. Also of James, her infant son.’ 

 He muttered the words over with a kind of mournful bitterness. ‘That’s just it—just it; that’s just how it goes!’... He yawned softly; the pathway had come to an end. Beyond him lay ranker grass, one and another obscurer mounds, an old scarred oak seat, shadowed by a few everlastingly green cypresses and coral-fruited yew-trees. And above and beyond all hung a pale blue arch of sky with a few voyaging clouds like silvered wool, and the calm wide curves of stubble field and pasture land. He stood with vacant eyes, not in the least aware how queer a figure he made with his gloves and his umbrella and his hat among the stained and tottering gravestones. Then, just to linger out his hour, and half sunken in reverie, he walked slowly over to the few solitary graves beneath the cypresses. 

 One only was commemorated with a tombstone, a rather unusual oval-headed stone, carved at each corner into what might be the heads of angels, or of pagan dryads, blindly facing each other with worn-out, sightless faces. A low curved granite canopy arched over the grave, with a crevice so wide between its stones that Lawford actually bent down and slid in his gloved fingers between them. He straightened himself with a sigh, and followed with extreme difficulty the well-nigh, illegible inscription: 

 ‘Here lie ye Bones of one, Nicholas Sabathier, a Stranger to this Parish, who fell by his own Hand on ye Eve of Ste. Michael and All Angels. MDCCXXXIX 

 Of the date he was a little uncertain. The ‘Hand’ had lost its ‘n’ and ‘d’; and all the ‘Angels’ rain had erased. He was not quite sure even of the ‘Stranger.’ There was a great rich ‘S,’ and the twisted tail of a ‘g’; and, whether or not, Lawford smilingly thought, he is no Stranger now. But how rare and how memorable a name! French evidently; probably Huguenot. And the Huguenots, he remembered vaguely, were a rather remarkable ‘crowd.’ He had, he thought, even played at ‘Huguenots’ once. What was the man’s name? Coligny; yes, of course, Coligny. ‘And I suppose,’ Lawford continued, muttering to himself, ‘I suppose this poor beggar was put here out of the way. They might, you know,’ he added confidentially, raising the ferrule of his umbrella, ‘they might have stuck a stake through you, and buried you at the 

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