They obeyed her, and she spent her few days partly on the fells, and partly in endless knitting and sewing for a war-workroom recently started in her immediate neighbourhood.  The emotion to which she surrendered herself would soon reduce her to a dull vacancy; and then she would sit passive, not forcing herself to think, alone in the old raftered room, or in the bit of garden outside, with its phloxes and golden rods; her small fingers working endlessly—­till the wave of feeling and memory returned upon her.  Those few days were a kind of ‘retreat,’ during which she lived absorbed in the recollections of her short, married life, and, above all, in which she tried piteously and bravely to make clear to herself what she believed; what sort of faith was in her for the present and the future.  It often seemed to her that during the year since George’s death, her mind had been wrenched and hammered into another shape.  It had grown so much older, she scarcely knew it herself.  Doubts she had never known before had come to her; but also, intermittently, a much keener faith.  Oh, yes, she believed in God.  She must; not only because George had believed in Him, but also because she, her very self, had been conscious, again and again, in the night hours, or on the mountains, of ineffable upliftings and communings, of flashes through the veil of things.  And so there must be another world; because the God she guessed at thus, with sudden adoring insight, could not have made her George, only to destroy him; only to give her to him for a month, and then strike him from her for ever.  The books she learnt to know through Farrell, belonging to that central modern literature, which is so wholly sceptical that the ‘great argument’ itself has almost lost interest for those who are producing it, often bewildered her, but did not really affect her.  Religion—­a vague, but deeply-felt religion—­soothed and sheltered her.  But she did not want to talk about it.

After these days were over, she emerged conscious of some radical change.  She seemed to have been walking with George ‘on the other side,’ and to have left him there—­for a while.  She now really believed him dead, and that she had got to live her life without him.  This first full and sincere admission of her loss tranquillised her.  All the more reason now that she should turn to the dear friendships that life still held, should live in and for them, and follow where they led, through the years before her.  Farrell, Cicely, Hester—­they stood between her weakness—­oh how conscious, how scornfully conscious, she was of it!—­and sheer desolation.  Cicely, ’Willy,’—­for somehow she and he had slipped almost without knowing it into Christian names—­had become to her as brother and sister.  And Hester too—­so strong!—­so kind!—­was part of her life; severe sometimes, but bracing.  Nelly was conscious, indeed, occasionally, that something in Hester disapproved something in her.  ‘But it would be all right,’ she thought, wearily, ’if only I were stronger.’  Did she mean physically or morally?  The girl’s thought did not distinguish.