Page:Magdalen by J S Machar.pdf/251

 “Where will my body be, when they are picking these cherries?” Lucy thought calmly.

At the left was a small pond. The heat of the sun beat upon it in a stream of light. Nearby was a mill its monotonous click re-echoed in the distance.

And again all was quiet about her. The telegraph posts, the young trees, the heaps of gravel, the meadows, and the fields,—the whole landscape faded away behind her Half an hour later she again passed through a village. Near the road lay a cemetery. Crosses and trees towered above the white wall.

“These cemeteries,” it occurred to her, “are all alike everywhere they take away that which is dearest tous”

And she walked and walked and thought: even thus, somewhere in the mountains, in a distant village, her mother’s dust was decaying; and there, behind her, they had this day covered up in the cemetery that head with its