“Angela, my dear, what are you doing here at this time of night?” he asked, in some surprise.

She blushed a little as she shook hands rather awkwardly with him.

“Don’t be angry with me,” she said in a deprecatory voice; “but I was so lonely this evening that I came here for company.”

“Came here for company!  What do you mean?”

She hung her head.

“Come,” he said, “tell me what you mean.”

“I don’t quite know myself.  How can I tell you?”

He looked more puzzled than ever, and she observed it and went on: 

“I will try to tell you, but you must not be cross like Pigott when she cannot understand me.  Sometimes I feel ever so much alone, as though I was looking for something and could not find it, and then I come and stand here and look at my mother’s grave, and I get company and am not lonely any more.  That is all I know; I cannot tell you any more.  Do you think me silly?  Pigott does.”

“I think you are a very strange child.  Are you not afraid to come here alone at night?”

“Afraid—­oh, no!  Nobody comes here; the people in the village dare not come here after dark, because they say that the ruins are full of spirits.  Jakes told me that.  But I must be stupid; I cannot see them, and I want so very much to see them.  I hope it is not wrong, but I told my father so the other day, and he turned white and was angry with Pigott for giving me such ideas; but you know Pigott did not give them to me at all.  I am not afraid to come; I like it, it is so quiet, and, if one listens enough in the quiet, I always think one may hear something that other people do not hear.”

“Do you hear anything, then?”

“Yes, I hear things, but I cannot understand them.  Listen to the wind in the branches of that tree, the chestnut, off which the leaf is falling now.  It says something, if only I could catch it.”

“Yes, child, yes, you are right in a way; all Nature tells the same eternal tale, if our ears were not stopped to its voices,” he answered, with a sigh; indeed, the child’s talk had struck a vein of thought familiar to his own mind, and, what is more, it deeply interested him; there was a quaint, far-off wisdom in it.

“It is pleasant to-night, is it not, Mr. Fraser?” said the little maid, “though everything is dying.  The things die softly without any pain this year; last year they were all killed in the rain and wind.  Look at that cloud floating across the moon, is it not beautiful?  I wonder what it is the shadow of; I think all the clouds are shadows of something up in heaven.”

“And when there are no clouds?”

“Oh! then heaven is quite still and happy.”

“But heaven is always happy.”

“Is it?  I don’t understand how it can be always happy if we go there.  There must be so many to be sorry for.”

Mr. Fraser mused a little; that last remark was difficult to answer.  He looked at the fleecy cloud, and, falling into her humour, said—­