Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/33

 ferent from anything we've ever done before. It all feels different to-day.'

'Nice child,' Graham smiled at her. Jill's fundamental trust in life often amused and often touched him.

Halfway up the shoulder of the cliff the grande route swept suddenly to the left, on level ground, while, on the right, the ascent continued, more steeply, by a narrow, stony road.

'This must be the way she told me of,' said Graham. 'And it's quite true that one wouldn't care to take the car up it.'

But Jill had stopped short and was staring at a high wall that ran along the grande route.

Above it, bristling against the background of forest green, was an extraordinary array of what looked like nothing in the world so much as large tin tubs turned upside down and mounted on stilts. There were myriads of them; and amidst the quietly rustling solitudes they had a grisly look.

'What in Heaven's name is that?' said Jill.

'This,' said Graham, after a silent survey, 'is evidently the cemetery. Charming, isn't it?' He was less startled than Jill; perhaps because he was by nature more acquiescent in the grisly.

'The cemetery? Why?'

'Ask me another. We must go in and see.'

'I haven't the least wish to go in.—Are they baths?'

'Not at all. And few of those who repose beneath them ever, I imagine, knew a bath. They are temples.