But there was not much to stay for, out in the park. There was that avenue of trees, that led up to the house. There was the bare bit of gravel that the house was set in. There was a place they called a herb-garden, that grew mostly nettles; and an overgrown wood with blocked-off paths. At the edge of the wood was a little stone win-dowless building Maud said was an ice-house. ''Let us just cross to the door and look inside,'' she would say, and she''d stand and gaze at the cloudy blocks of ice until she shivered. At the back of the icehouse there started a muddy lane, that led you to a shut-up old red chapel surrounded by yews. This was the queerest, quietest place I ever saw. I never heard a bird sing there. I didn''t like to go to it, but Maud took that way often. For at the chapel there were graves, of all the Lillys that had come before her; and one of these was a plain stone tomb, that was the grave of her mother.
She could sit and look at that for an hour at a time, hardly blinking. Her scissors she used, not for gathering flowers, but only for keeping down the grass that grew about it; and where her mother''s name was picked out in letters of lead she would rub with her wet handkerchief to take off stains.
She would rub until her hand shook and her breath came quick. She would never let me help her. That first day, when I tried, she said,