to stay here."

"Here? Where? What do you mean?"

"These are my folks. I'm going to stay with them."

Mr. Miles lowered his voice. "But it's not possible--you don't know what
you are doing. You can't stay among these people: you must come with
me."

She shook her head and rose from her knees. The group about the grave
had scattered in the darkness, but the old woman with the lantern stood
waiting. Her mournful withered face was not unkind, and Charity went up
to her.

"Have you got a place where I can lie down for the night?" she asked.
Liff came up, leading the buggy out of the night. He looked from one
to the other with his feeble smile. "She's my mother. She'll take you
home," he said; and he added, raising his voice to speak to the
old woman: "It's the girl from lawyer Royall's--Mary's girl... you
remember...."

The woman nodded and raised her sad old eyes to Charity's. When Mr.
Miles and Liff clambered into the buggy she went ahead with the lantern
to show them the track they were to follow; then she turned back, and in
silence she and Charity walked away together through the night.

XVII

CHARITY lay on the floor on a mattress, as her dead mother's body had
lain. The room in which she lay was cold and dark and low-ceilinged, and
even poorer and barer than the scene of Mary Hyatt's earthly pilgrimage.
On the other side of the fireless stove Liff Hyatt's mother slept on
a blanket, with two children--her grandchildren, she said--rolled up
against her like sleeping puppies. They had their thin clothes spread
over them, having given the only other blanket to their guest.

Through the small square of glass in the opposite wall Charity saw a
deep funnel of sky, so black, so remote, so palpitating with frosty
stars that her very soul seemed to be sucked into it. Up there
somewhere, she supposed, the God whom Mr. Miles had invoked was waiting
for Mary Hyatt to appear. What a long flight it was! And what would she
have to say when she reached Him?

Charity's bewildered brain laboured with the attempt to picture her
mother's past, and to relate it in any way to the designs of a just but
merciful God; but it was impossible to imagine any link between them.
She herself felt as remote from the poor creature she had seen lowered
into her hastily dug grave as if the height of the heavens divided them.
She had seen poverty and misfortune in her life; but in a community
where poor thrifty Mrs. Hawes and the in