‘No, no, brother,’ she said, ‘never no more.’

She put on her shawl.  I rose mechanically.  When she bade Cyril and Wilderspin good-bye and passed out of the studio, I did so too.  In the street she stood and looked wistfully at me, as though she saw me through a mist, and then bade me good-bye, saying that she must go to Kingston Vale where her people were encamped in a hired field.  We separated, and I wandered I knew not whither.

III

I found myself inquiring for the New North Cemetery, and after a time I stood looking through the bars of tall iron gates at long lines of gravestones and dreary hillocks before me.  Then I went in, walking straight over the grass towards a gravedigger digging in the sunshine.  He looked at me, resting his foot on his spade.

‘I want to find a grave.’

‘What part was the party buried in?’

‘The pauper part,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ said he, losing suddenly his respectful tone.  ’When was she buried?  I suppose it was a she by the look o’ you.’

‘When?  I don’t know the date.’

‘Rather a wide order that, but there’s the pauper part.’  And he pointed to a spot at some little distance, where there were no gravestones and no shrubs.  I walked across to this Desert of Poverty, which seemed too cheerless for a place of rest.  I stood and gazed at the mounds till the black coffins underneath grew upon my mental vision, and seemed to press upon my brain.  Thoughts I had none, only a sense of being another person.

The man came slowly towards me, and then looked meditatively into my face.  I shall never forget him.  A tall, sallow, emaciated man he was, with cheek-bones high and sharp as an American Indian’s, and straight black hair.  He looked like a wooden image of Mephistopheles, carved with a jack-knife.

‘Who are you?’ The words seemed to come, not from the gravedigger’s mouth, but from those piles of lamp-blacked coffins which were searing my eyes through four feet of graveyard earth.  By the fever-fires in my brain I seemed to see the very faces of the corpses.

‘Who am I?’ I said to myself, as I thought, but evidently aloud; ’I am the Fool of Superstition.  I am Fenella Stanley’s Fool, and Sinfi Lovell’s Fool, and Philip Aylwin’s Fool, who went and averted a curse from one of the heads resting down here, averted a curse by burying a jewel in a dead man’s tomb.’

‘Not in this cemetery, so none o’ your gammon,’ said the gravedigger, who had overheard me.  ’The on’y people as is fools enough to bury jewels with dead bodies is the Gypsies, and they take precious good care, as I know, to keep it mum where they bury ‘em.  There’s bin as much diggin’ for them thousand guineas as was buried with Jerry Chilcott in Foxleigh Parish, where I was born, as would more nor pay for emptying a gold mine; but I never heard o’ Christian folk a-buryin’ jewels.  But who are you?’