She had married William Temple , the brother of his great-grandfather , and as she stood in her white dress beside her bridegroom , at the conclusion of the wedding ceremony , a jilted lover , crazed by despair , had entered the house and shot her dead . She had been buried in the shore field , where a square space had been dyked off in the centre for a burial lot because the church was then so far away . With the passage of years the lot had grown up so thickly with fir and birch and wild cherry that it looked like a compact grove . A winding path led through it to its heart where Isabel Temple 's grave was , thickly overgrown with long , silken , pale green grass . Roger hurried along the path and sat down on the big grey boulder by the grave , looking about him with a long breath of delight . How lovely -- and witching -- and unearthly it was here . Little ferns were growing in the hollows and cracks of the big boulder where clay had lodged . Over Isabel Temple 's crooked , lichened gravestone hung a young wild cherry in its delicate bloom . Above it , in a little space of sky left by the slender tree tops , was a young moon . It was too dark here after all to read Wordsworth , but that did not matter . The place , with its moist air , its tang of fir balsam , was like a perfumed room where a man might dream dreams and see visions . There was a soft murmur of wind in the boughs over him , and the faraway moan of the sea on the bar crept in . Roger surrendered himself utterly to the charm of the place . When he entered that grove , he had left behind the realm of daylight and things known and come into the realm of shadow and mystery and enchantment . Anything might happen -- anything might be true . Eighty long years had come and gone , but Isabel Temple , thus cruelly torn from life at the moment when it had promised her most , did not even yet rest calmly in her grave ; such at least was the story , and Roger believed it . It was in his blood to believe it . The Temples were a superstitious family , and there was nothing in Roger 's upbringing to correct the tendency . His was not a sceptical or scientific mind . He was ignorant and poetical and credulous .
He had always accepted unquestioningly the tale that Isabel Temple had been seen on earth long XXXXX the red clay was heaped over her murdered body .
after as at because beside by into through to with