With the first light she put it on again, and stealing from bed, bathed
long and stealthily those eyes which felt as though they had been burned
all night; thence went to the open window and leaned out. Dawn had
passed, the birds were at morning music. Down there in the garden her
flowers were meshed with the grey dew, and the trees were grey, spun
with haze; dim and spectrelike, the old hunter, with his nose on the
paddock rail, dozed in the summer mist.

And all that had been to her like prison out there, and all that she had
loved, stole up on the breath of the unaired morning, and kept beating
in her face, fluttering at the white linen above her heart like the
wings of birds flying.

The first morning song ceased, and at the silence the sun smiled out in
golden irony, and everything was shot with colour. A wan glow fell on
Mrs. Pendyce's spirit, that for so many hours had been heavy and grey in
lonely resolution. For to her gentle soul, unused to action, shrinking
from violence, whose strength was the gift of the ages, passed into it
against her very nature, the resolution she had formed was full of pain.
Yet painful, even terrible in its demand for action, it did not waver,
but shone like a star behind the dark and heavy clouds. In Margery
Pendyce (who had been a Totteridge) there was no irascible and acrid
"people's blood," no fierce misgivings, no ill-digested beer and
cider--it was pure claret in her veins--she had nothing thick and angry
in her soul to help her; that which she had resolved she must carry out,
by virtue of a thin, fine flame, breathing far down in her--so far that
nothing could extinguish it, so far that it had little warmth. It was
not "I will not be overridden" that her spirit felt, but "I must not be
over-ridden, for if I am over-ridden, I, and in me something beyond me,
more important than myself, is all undone." And though she was far from
knowing this, that something was her country's civilisation, its very
soul, the meaning of it all gentleness, balance. Her spirit, of that
quality so little gross that it would never set up a mean or petty
quarrel, make mountains out of mole-hills, distort proportion, or get
images awry, had taken its stand unconsciously, no sooner than it must,
no later than it ought, and from that stand would not recede. The issue
had passed beyond mother love to that self-love, deepest of all, which
says:

"Do this, or forfeit the essence of your soul"

And now