Page:The Country-House Party.djvu/25

Rh mother? She could remember them. Had they not reared her, an orphaned child? so good they were, so respectable, such Christian people. To lie with the weight of dutiful, good James, and his sandy-haired, domesticated wife, and their very perfect dull children, pressing her down, keeping her in place, as it were. And John, poor John, beside her, bidding her lie still, because this was a highly respectable tomb, and no one in all the crumbling coffins that were around and beneath them had ever murmured in his long sleep. She wished to be burnt like Shelley, and her dust cast to the breeze, to be blown hither and thither, settling never, going up with the dead leaves in the whirlwind, and roaming with the winds over the earth she had loved but not known in life.

She smiled as she thought of all this—which she had not dared to breathe to John. She could see his poor face pale and aghast at the idea! What! Not be buried in the family vault! She could almost hear his Christian parents turn in their graves to clutch her and chain her down lest she escape.

'But I won't go there, John! I'll let the waves