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."