“Anything can be bought,” he retorted, with his quiet, hoarse persuasiveness, “at a price.  I’ve got the price, no matter what it is.”

Suddenly I understood my pink and hard acquaintance.  I understood that stale look in his eyes.  Tears do not bring that.  Nothing brings it but sleepless thoughts beyond the assuagement of tears.  Behind such eyes the heart is aching cold and the brain searing hot.  Who should know better than I, though the kindly years have brought their healing!  But here was a wound, raw and fresh and savage.  I put my hand on his shoulder.

“What was little Minnie to you?” I asked, and answered myself.  “You’re Hines.  You’re the man she married.”

“Yes.  I’m Chris Hines.”

“You’ve brought her back to us,” I said stupidly.

“She made me promise.”

Strange how Our Square binds the heartstrings of those who have once lived in it!  To find it unendurable in life, to yearn back to it in the hour of death!  Many have known the experience.  So our tiny God’s Acre, shrunk to a small fraction of human acreage through pressure of the encroaching tenements, has filled up until now it has space but for few more of the returning.  Laws have been invoked and high and learned courts appealed to for the jealously guarded right to sleep there, as Minnie Munn was so soon to sleep beside her mother.

I told Hines that I would see the Bonnie Lassie about the statuette, and led him on, through the nagged and echoing passage and the iron gate, to the white-studded space of graves.  The new excavation showed, brown against the bright verdure.  Above it stood the headstone of the Munns, solemn and proud, the cost of a quarter-year’s salary, at the pitiful wage which little, broken Mr. Munn drew from his municipal clerkship.  Hines’s elegant coat rippled on his chest, above what may have been a shudder, as he looked about him.

“It’s crowded,” he muttered.

“We lie close, as we lived close, in Our Square.  I am glad for her father’s sake that Minnie wished to come back.”

“She said she couldn’t rest peaceful anywhere else.  She said she had some sort of right to be here.”

“The Munns belong to what we call the Inalienables in Our Square,” said I, and told him of the high court decision which secured to the descendants of the original “churchyard membership,” and to them alone, the inalienable right to lie in God’s Acre, provided, as in the ancient charter, they had “died in honorable estate.”  I added:  “Bartholomew Storrs, as sexton, has constituted himself watchdog of our graves and censor of our dead.  He carried one case to the Supreme Court in an attempt to keep an unhappy woman from sleeping in that pious company.”

“That sour-faced prohibitionist?” growled Mr. Hines, employing what I suspect to be the blackest anathema in his lexicon.  “Is he the sexton?”

“The same.  Our mortuary genius,” I confirmed.