A meaning, a cohesion in everything she saw, struck on Joanna’s spirit as the opening bars of a compelling air of music strike on the ear. The freshness, the pulsing flight of some birds speeding inland, the faint stirring of the trees, the first thin, blue smoke rising from a distant cottage chimney – these were harmonies in a complicated yet decisive theme. They were full of solutions. They gave release to all that was cramped and tortured in the heart. And dominating all of them – like a thought, like melody, like the soul of man – went the tiny, indomitable brown sails, beating along home between the sea and the sky.

VIII

But the funeral and all connected with it was a progression of horrors.

On the steamer, the coffin having been slung on board from the ferry like any other piece of heavy luggage, Linnet and Joanna felt as if they were the sharers in a shameful secret. In Glasgow, the house stank with the sweetness of white flowers, most of them sent out of mere respect by old acquaintances of their father, so that to Juley’s children the names on the cards were but names. And the rooms seemed always full of whispering people who would belie the dead by their praises. The only relief came from such of Juley’s poor folk as came timidly to the door that they might look once more upon her face and weep. For to them Juley had been but goodness and mercy, and nought besides.

Georgie, in spite of her condition, had travelled north. Her grief was real and simple. Yet when she joined exuberantly with Aunt Georgina, Aunt Ellen and Mrs. Boyd in cataloguing her mother’s virtues, Joanna turned away, feeling that the dead woman was deserted indeed. If only one of them would say the truth – “She failed,” or “She went unfulfilled,” or “In death alone has she come to blossom!” But no. They would have it, perhaps for their own solace, that she had gone bearing her sheaves with her.

More loving than such love there flamed up in Joanna the desire for clear knowledge, for the deep and free admission in which alone our failures may find their absolution, even their vindication. Oh, when she came to die, might there be one that kept knowledge of her, rather than many that self-sparingly loved, forgave, and so annulled her!