Grasping her paint
box, she got out.
"Won't this do, Frank?"
Ashurst, rather like a bearded Schiller, grey in the wings, tall,
long-legged, with large remote grey eyes which sometimes filled with
meaning and became almost beautiful, with nose a little to one side, and
bearded lips just open--Ashurst, forty-eight, and silent, grasped the
luncheon basket, and got out too.
"Oh! Look, Frank! A grave!"
By the side of the road, where the track from the top of the common
crossed it at right angles and ran through a gate past the narrow wood,
was a thin mound of turf, six feet by one, with a moorstone to the
west, and on it someone had thrown a blackthorn spray and a handful of
bluebells. Ashurst looked, and the poet in him moved. At cross-roads--a
suicide's grave! Poor mortals with their superstitions! Whoever lay
there, though, had the best of it, no clammy sepulchre among other
hideous graves carved with futilities--just a rough stone, the wide sky,
and wayside blessings! And, without comment, for he had learned not to
be a philosopher in the bosom of his family, he strode away up on to the
common, dropped the luncheon basket under a wall, spread a rug for
his wife to sit on--she would turn up from her sketching when she
was hungry--and took from his pocket Murray's translation of the
"Hippolytus.
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