l less to think of him as he had been once, warm and
loving, with his caressing hands and untidy hair, with his flushed cheek
pressed against hers, and the good smell of his clothes--with his living
mouth closing slowly down on hers ... no, earth was even sharper than
heaven. All she had of him in which her memory and her love could find
rest were those few common things they keep to remember their dead by on
the Marsh--a memorial card, thickly edged with black, which she had had
printed at her own expense, since apparently such things were no part of
the mourning of North Farthing House; his photograph in a black frame;
his grave in Brodnyx churchyard, in the shadow of the black,
three-hooded tower, and not very far from the altar-tomb on which he had
sat and waited for her that Christmas morning.

Sec.3

In the fall of the next year, she found that once again she had
something to engross her outside Ansdore. Ellen was to leave school that
Christmas. The little sister was now seventeen, and endowed with all the
grace; and learning that forty pounds a term can buy. During the last
year she and Joanna had seen comparatively little of each other. She had
received one or two invitations from her school friends to spend her
holidays with them--a fine testimonial, thought Joanna, to her manners
and accomplishments--and her sister had been only too glad that she
should go, that she should be put out of the shadow of a grief which had
grown too black even for her sentimental schoolgirl sympathy, so
gushing and caressing, in the first weeks of her poor Joanna's mourning.

But things were different now--Martin's memory was laid. She told
herself that it was because she was too busy that she had not gone as
usual to the Harvest Festival at New Romney, to sing hymns beside the
pillar marked with the old floods. She was beginning to forget. She
could think and she could love. She longed to have Ellen back again, to
love and spoil and chasten. She was glad that she was leaving school,
and would make no fugitive visit to Ansdore. Immediately her mind leapt
to preparations--her sister was too big to sleep any more in the little
bed at the foot of her own, she must have a new bed ... and suddenly
Joanna thought of a new room, a project which would mop up all her
overflowing energies for the next month.

It should be a surprise for Ellen. She sent for painters and
paper-hangers, and chose a wonderful new wall-paper of climbing