"You extraordinary girl!" said a pleasant voice.
Looking round, Sylvia saw a thin clean-shaven man of about thirty, who was leaning on a cane with an ivory crook and looking at her epitaph through gold-rimmed glasses. She blushed, to her annoyance, and snatched up the twig.
"What are you always running away from?" the stranger asked. "Or is that an indiscreet question?"
Sylvia could have shaken herself for not giving a ready answer, but this new-comer seemed entitled to something better than rudeness, and her ready answers were usually rude.
"Now don't go away," the stranger begged. "It's so refreshing to meet something alive in this wilderness of death. I've been inspecting a grave for a friend who is abroad, and I'm feeling thoroughly depressed. One can't avoid reading epitaphs in a cemetery, can one? Or writing them?" he added, with a pleasant laugh. "I like yours much the best of any I've read so far. What a charming name. Sylvia Scarlett. Balzac said the best epitaphs were single names. If I saw Sylvia Scarlett on a tomb with nothing else, my appetite for romance would be perfectly satisfied."
"Have you read many books of Balzac?" Sylvia asked.
The stranger's conversation had detained her; she could ask the question quite simply.
"I've read some," Sylvia said. "But he's not my favorite writer. I like Scott better. But now I only read books about the Orient."
She was rather proud of the last word and hoped the stranger would notice it.
"I think Japan," Sylvia said. "But I like Turkey rather. Only I wouldn't ever let myself be shut up in a harem."
"I suppose you'd run away?" said the stranger, with a smile. "Which reminds me that you haven't answered my first question. Please do, if it's not impertinent."
They wandered along the paths shaded by yews and willows, and Sylvia told him many things about her life; he was the easiest person to talk to that she had ever met.
"And so this passion for the East has been inspired by the Hall of a Thousand and One Marvels. Dear me, what an unexpected consequence. And this Hall of a Thousand and One Marbles," he indicated the cemetery with a sweep of his cane, "this inspires you to write an epitaph? Well, my dear, such an early essay in mortuary literature may end in a famous elegy. You evidently possess the poetic temperament."