sed a space of shadow again, the familiarity of
dread-worship, during which she was moved, oblivious, to
Cossethay. There, at first, there was nothing--just grey
nothing. But then one morning there was a light from the yellow
jasmine caught her, and after that, morning and evening, the
persistent ringing of thrushes from the shrubbery, till her
heart, beaten upon, was forced to lift up its voice in rivalry
and answer. Little tunes came into her mind. She was full of
trouble almost like anguish. Resistant, she knew she was beaten,
and from fear of darkness turned to fear of light. She would
have hidden herself indoors, if she could. Above all, she craved
for the peace and heavy oblivion of her old state. She could not
bear to come to, to realize. The first pangs of this new
parturition were so acute, she knew she could not bear it. She
would rather remain out of life, than be torn, mutilated into
this birth, which she could not survive. She had not the
strength to come to life now, in England, so foreign, skies so
hostile. She knew she would die like an early, colourless,
scentless flower that the end of the winter puts forth
mercilessly. And she wanted to harbour her modicum of twinkling
life.

But a sunshiny day came full of the scent of a mezereon tree,
when bees were tumbling into the yellow crocuses, and she
forgot, she felt like somebody else, not herself, a new person,
quite glad. But she knew it was fragile, and she dreaded it. The
vicar put pea-flower into the crocuses, for his bees to roll in,
and she laughed. Then night came, with brilliant stars that she
knew of old, from her girlhood. And they flashed so bright, she
knew they were victors.

She could neither wake nor sleep. As if crushed between the
past and the future, like a flower that comes above-ground to
find a great stone lying above it, she was helpless.

The bewilderment and helplessness continued, she was
surrounded by great moving masses that must crush her. And there
was no escape. Save in the old obliviousness, the cold darkness
she strove to retain. But the vicar showed her eggs in the
thrush's nest near the back door. She saw herself the
mother-thrush upon the nest, and the way her wings were spread,
so eager down upon her secret. The tense, eager, nesting wings
moved her beyond endurance. She thought of them in the morning,
when she heard the thrush whistling as he got up, and she
thought, "Why didn't I die out there, why am I brought