r would
she beat his dog out of the house with the handle of the broom. No
longer would she forgather with the neighbors over a pot of tea for a
pleasant vindictive chat. No longer would she look out to sea for him
with her half-loving, half-inimical eyes. No longer in her sharpish
voice would she recite her rosary and go to bed.

And to-morrow they would bury her--there would be rain to-morrow: the
wind was sou'east,--they would lower her, gently as though she were
alive, into a rectangular slot in the ground, mutter alien prayers in an
alien tongue with business of white magic, pat the mound over as a child
pats his castle of sand on the sea-shore--and leave her there in the
rain.

A month from now they would say a mass for her, a year from now another,
but to-morrow, to-day, yesterday even, she was finished with all of
life--with the fussy excited robins of dawn; with the old dog that
wanted to drowse by the fire; with the young husband who was either too
much or too little of a man for her; with the clicking beads she would
tell in her sharpish voice; with each thing; with everything....

And here was the wonder of it, the strange dumb wonder, that the
snapping of her life meant less in reality to him than the snapping of a
stay aboard ship. The day after to-morrow he would mount the deck of
Patrick Russell's boat, and after a few crisp orders would set out on
the eternal sea, as though she were still alive in her cottage, as
though, indeed, she had never even lived, and northward he would go past
the purple Mull of Cantyre; past the Clyde, where the Ayrshire sloops
danced like bobbins on the water; past the isles, where overhead drove
the wedges of the wild swans, trumpeting as on a battle-field; past the
Hebrides, where strange arctic birds whined like hurt dogs; northward
still to where the northern lights sprang like dancers in the black
winter nights; eastward and southward to where the swell of the Dogger
Bank rose, where the fish grazed like kine.... Over the great sea he
would go, as though nothing had happened, not even the snapping of a
stay--down to the sea, where the crisp winds of dawn were, and the
playful, stupid, short-sighted porpoises; the treacherous, sliding
icebergs; and the gulls that cried with the sea's immense melancholy;
and the great plum-colored whales....

PART THREE

THE MOUTH OF HONEY

Section 1

It was all like a picture some painter of an old and obvious school
migh