'Willingly, but just where do you propose that we talk? It's dark and passing gloomy out here, and I see no place to sit.'

She frowned. It was true, there was no place where they might sit alone and talk. She bade Cupid hold high the lantern, while she searched for a fallen log or stone. Then her gaze fell on the silent little graveyard. 'Over there, Father, we can sit.'

Aaron laughed. 'I find your choice a trifle macabre, but so be it.'

He followed her through the wrought-iron gate; they took the lantern, and dismissed Cupid, who scuttled away terrified by the possibility of 'hants. 'Aaron spread his traveling cloak over one of the raised horizontal slabs, and they seated themselves on it.

'This is a mournful and eerie place,' observed Aaron, contemplating the hemming trunks of live-oaks and their burden of weeping moss.

She shuddered. 'I know. I hate it. I never come here. I confess I'm afraid of the place—not of the quiet people who already lie here, but I think I'm afraid of the future ones: of those to come. I don't want to lie here——' She broke off. No, she didn't want to lie here under the weeping trees with people and in a country that were alien. For a second terror seized her. All those people up there at the house, the Alstons, how many of them were destined to end here in this mouldering plot—? And I, too; they'll pull me in and bury me here, because I bear their name; my body will fester and crumble next to theirs, we shall mingle together to form yet more of this hateful black earth.

She caught her breath in a little sobbing gasp. 'Promise me, Father, that you won't let me be put here——'

'My dear child,' said Aaron briskly, 'you are being not only exceedingly morbid but very foolish. You are twenty-one, and I am forty-eight. It is, therefore, unlikely that I shall have the opportunity of directing the disposition of your remains. If you can't think of more pleasing topics of conversation, I move we go elsewhere'. He belied the severity of his words, however, by putting an arm around her and giving her a small affectionate shake.

Her terror vanished at his touch. 'Forgive me,' she said, and managed to laugh. 'Tell me of your journeys; the letters were so few. The heat down in Georgia and the Floridas must have been frightful. And you were miraculously lucky to have escaped the fever.'

Aaron shrugged. 'I did, at any rate. I confess that my four hundred miles of travel in an open canoe became a trifle tedious, but I'm none the worse for it and brown as a mulatto, as you'll see when we get into the light.'