Annie Kilburn

Now that she saw it in position she wished to ask Mr. Bolton what was

thought of it, but she could not nerve herself to the question. He remained

silent, and she felt that he was sorry for her. "Oh, may I be very humble;

may I be helped to be very humble!" she prayed under her breath. It

seemed as if she could not take her eyes from the figure; it was such a

modern, such an American shape, so youthfully inadequate, so simple, so

sophisticated, so like a young lady in society indecorously exposed for

a _tableau vivant_. She wondered if the people in Hatboro' felt all

this about it; if they realised how its involuntary frivolity insulted the

solemn memory of the slain.

"Drive on, please," she said gently.

Bolton pulled the reins, and as the horses started he pointed with his whip

to a church at the other side of the green. "That's the new Orthodox

church," he explained.

"Oh, is it?" asked Miss Kilburn. "It's very handsome, I'm sure." She was

not sensible of admiring the large Romanesque pile very much, though it

was certainly not bad, but she remembered that Bolton was a member of the

Orthodox church, and she was grateful to him for not saying anything about

the soldiers' monument.

"We sold the old buildin' to the Catholics, and they moved it down ont' the

side street."

Miss Kilburn caught the glimmer of a cross where he beckoned, through the

flutter of the foliage.

"They had to razee the steeple some to git their cross on," he added;

and then he showed her the high-school building as they passed, and the

Episcopal chapel, of blameless church-warden's Gothic, half hidden by its

Japanese ivy, under a branching elm, on another side street.

"Yes," she said, "that was built before we went abroad."

"I disremember," he said absently. He let the horses walk on the soft,

darkly shaded road, where the wheels made a pleasant grinding sound, and

set himself sidewise on his front seat, so as to talk to Miss Kilburn more

at his ease.

"I d'know," he began, after clearing his throat, with a conscious air, "as

you know we'd got a new minister to our church."

"No, I hadn't heard of it," said Miss Kilburn, with her mind full of the

monument still. "But I might have heard and forgotten it," she added. "I

was very much taken up toward the last before I left Rome."