And she was uneasy. She went past
the gorse bushes shrinking from their presence, she stepped into
the heather as into a quickening bath that almost hurt. Her
fingers moved over the clasped fingers of the child, she heard
the anxious voice of the baby, as it tried to make her talk,
distraught.

And she shrank away again, back into her darkness, and for a
long while remained blotted safely away from living. But autumn
came with the faint red glimmer of robins singing, winter
darkened the moors, and almost savagely she turned again to
life, demanding her life back again, demanding that it should be
as it had been when she was a girl, on the land at home, under
the sky. Snow lay in great expanses, the telegraph posts strode
over the white earth, away under the gloom of the sky. And
savagely her desire rose in her again, demanding that this was
Poland, her youth, that all was her own again.

But there were no sledges nor bells, she did not see the
peasants coming out like new people, in their sheepskins and
their fresh, ruddy, bright faces, that seemed to become new and
vivid when the snow lit up the ground. It did not come to her,
the life of her youth, it did not come back. There was a little
agony of struggle, then a relapse into the darkness of the
convent, where Satan and the devils raged round the walls, and
Christ was white on the cross of victory.

She watched from the sick-room the snow whirl past, like
flocks of shadows in haste, flying on some final mission out to
a leaden inalterable sea, beyond the final whiteness of the
curving shore, and the snow-speckled blackness of the rocks half
submerged. But near at hand on the trees the snow was soft in
bloom. Only the voice of the dying vicar spoke grey and
querulous from behind.

By the time the snowdrops were out, however, he was dead. He
was dead. But with curious equanimity the returning woman
watched the snowdrops on the edge of the grass below, blown
white in the wind, but not to be blown away. She watched them
fluttering and bobbing, the white, shut flowers, anchored by a
thread to the grey-green grass, yet never blown away, not
drifting with the wind.

As she rose in the morning, the dawn was beating up white,
gusts of light blown like a thin snowstorm from the east, blown
stronger and fiercer, till the rose appeared, and the gold, and
the sea lit up below. She was impassive and indifferent. Yet she
was outside the enclosure of darkness.

There pas