“These children are dear to Me,” it ran. “Be a mother to them and more than a mother. Watch over them tenderly. Be just and kind. If thy heart is not large enough to embrace them, I will enlarge it after a pattern of My Own. If these young children are docile and obedient, bless Me for it: if they are froward, call upon Me for help: if they weary thee, I will be thy Consolation: if thou sink under thy burden, I will be thy Reward.”

The daughter, having read, leaned down, whispered something in her dead mother’s ear, and ran out of the cottage blind with tears.

This was death. Not the cold forehead, the stillness, the sad, uncouth posture. But this – that the child could never again say – “I love you,” and see her mother’s eyes light up with joy! How unimaginable it was, and how pitiful, that she should now have to ask herself whether once in all these years of womanhood she had clearly and simply declared her love! Now it seemed to her that all these years her mother had been supplicating for that alone. And now it was too late.

In the afternoon Joanna and an old woman from the village washed Juley’s body and dressed it for burial.

The brother and sister took turns in sitting by the dead till morning. Sometimes they remained a while together, talking in low tones. Once or twice they laughed a little. They felt like plotters.

At dawn Joanna was there alone, and suddenly she could endure the room no longer. What foolishness to stay here when her mother had escaped – had gone like a bird over a lake – had fled and left behind all the tedious, daily matters she had so hated, the staleness, the fearfulness, the makeshifts, the heavy, dragging carcase of flesh!

Outside on the road before the cottage door, she drew a breath of the early morning deep into her weary body. After the night in that miserable, airless death-chamber, she knew how to savour the caller saltness of the sea-weed and wet rocks: she could detect by turning her face inland, that warmer yet as sharp fragrance of the bog-myrtle: and through eager nostrils she inhaled the homely pungency of the peat-reek. In her blood she could feel the stirring and upstanding of the millions of tiny plants upon the hillside. With her blood she knew them – the little spiky, spotted, orchises, the knowing fly-catchers with sticky leaves, the waxy heads of bell-heather, the small daisy buds – innocent buds that, like cherubim and seraphim, covered their faces, with all their narrow, crimson-tipt feathers. The sun was not yet risen, but the sky looked pearly, and far up some flakes of cloud, winging higher than the rest, were rosy with prophecy.

Then along the horizon a line of fishing-smacks came beating back to harbour after the night’s catch.