Jane Sands' kind, placid face was
still as kind and placid. Some of the girls had left school and gone
to service; some of the lads had developed into hobbledehoys and came
to church with walking-sticks and well-oiled hair; one or two of the
old folks had died; one or two more white-headed babies crawled about
the cottage floors; but otherwise Downside was just the same as it had
been five years before, when, one June morning, a self-willed girl had
softly opened the door under the honeysuckle porch and stepped out into
the dewy garden, where the birds were calling such a glad good-morning
as she passed to join her lover in the lane.

But the flame of life burns quicker and fiercer in London than at
Downside, for that same girl, coming back after only five years in
London, was so changed and aged and altered that--though, to be sure,
she came in the dusk and was muffled up in a big shawl--no one
recognised her, or thought for a moment of pretty, coquettish,
well-dressed Edith Robins, when the weary, shabby-looking woman passed
them by. She had lingered a minute or two by the churchyard gate,
though tramps, for such her worn-out boots and muddy skirts proclaimed
her, do not, as a rule, care for such music as sounded out from the
church door, where Mr Robins was consoling himself for the irritation
of choir-practice by ten minutes' playing. It was soon over, and Jack
Davis, still blower, and not much taller than he was five years before,
charged out in the rebound from the tension of long blowing, and nearly
knocked over the woman standing by the churchyard gate in the shadow of
the yew-tree, and made the baby she held in her arms give a feeble cry.

'Now then, out of the way!' he shouted in that unnecessarily loud voice
boys assume after church, perhaps to try if their lungs are still
capable of producing such a noise after enforced silence.

The woman made no answer, but after the boy had run off, went in and
waited in the porch till the sound of turning keys announced that the
organist was closing the organ and church for the night. But as his
footsteps drew near on the stone pavement she started and trembled as
if she had been afraid, and when he came out into the porch she shrank
away into the shadow as if she wished to be unobserved. He might
easily have passed her, for it was nearly dark from the yew-tree and
the row of elms that shut out, the western sky, where the sunset was
just dying away. His mind, too