"Yo' 're right, co'nnle," she said, ostentatiously slanting her parasol
in a marvelous simulation of hiding a purely imaginative blush on a
cheek that was perfectly infantine in its unchanged pink; "company talk
is much pootier than what we've been saying. And--meaning me--for I
reckon yo' wouldn't say that of any other girl but the one yo' 're
walking with--what's the matter with me?"

He could not help smiling, though he hesitated. "Nothing! but others
have been disappointed."

"And that bothers YO'?"

"I mean I have as yet had no right to put your feelings to any test,
while"--

"Poor Chet had, yo' were going to say! Well, here we are at the
cemetery! I reckoned yo' were bound to get back to the dead again before
we'd gone far, and that's why I thought we might take the cemetery on
our way. It may put me in a more proper frame of mind to please yo'."

As he raised his eyes he could not repress a slight start. He had not
noticed before that they had passed through a small gateway on diverging
from the road, and was quite unprepared to find himself on the edge of a
gentle slope leading to a beautiful valley, and before him a long vista
of tombs, white head-stones and low crosses, edged by drooping cypress
and trailing feathery vines. Some vines had fallen and been caught in
long loops from bough to bough, like funeral garlands, and here and
there the tops of isolated palmettos lifted a cluster of hearse-like
plumes. Yet in spite of this dominance of sombre but graceful shadow,