, but without
pain--as nearly as might be that absorption into nothingness for which
she yearned as the Buddhist seeks absorption into God.

She rested, not suffering--at least not suffering anything she could
feel. She was beyond grief. The only thing she was not beyond was the
horror of returning to the interests that had hitherto made up life.

As for Claude, she could think of him, when she began doing so, with
singular detachment. The whole episode with him might have been ended
years before. It was like something which no longer perturbs, though the
memory of it is vivid. She could go back and reconstruct the experience
from the first. Up to the present she had never found any opportunity of
doing that, since each meeting with him was so soul-filling in itself.
Now that she had the leisure, she found herself using it as the
afternoon wore on.

Being on the spot where she had first met him, she could re-enact the
scene. She knew the very raspberry-bine at which she had been at work.
She went to it and lifted it up. It was a spiny, red-brown, sprawling
thing just beginning to clothe itself with leaves. It had been
breast-high when she had picked the fruit from it, and Claude had stood
over there, in that patch of common brakes which then rose above his
knees, but was now a bed of delicate, elongated sprays leaning backward
with incomparable grace. She found the heart to sing--her voice, which
used to be strong enough, yielding her but the ghost of song, as the
notes of an old spinnet give back the ghost of music long ago dead:

"Oh, mirk, mirk is the midnight hour,
And loud the tempest's roar;
A waeful wanderer seeks thy tower,
Lord Gregory ope thy door."

She could not remember having so much as hummed this air since the day
Claude had interrupted it; but she went on, unfalteringly, to the lines
at which he had broken in:

"At least be pity to me shown,
If love it may na' be--"

She didn't falter even here; she only allowed her voice to trail away in
the awed pianissimo into which he had frightened her. She stopped then
and went through the conversation that ensued on the memorable day, and
of which the very words were imprinted on her heart: "Isn't it Rosie?
I'm Claude." She hadn't smiled on that occasion, but she smiled to
herself now--a ghost of a smile to match her ghost of a voice--because
his tone had been so sweet. She had never heard anything like it
before--and since