March shewed some pale gleams of spring, but April was one of the coldest and dreariest in the memory of living man.  The old earth in sympathy with the great struggle that was devastating and searing her, seemed to be withholding leaf and flower, and forbidding the sun to woo her.

Till the very first days of May!  Then, with a great return upon herself, Nature flew to work.  The trees rushed into leaf, and never had there been such a glorious leafage.  Everything was late, but everything was perfection.  And nowhere was the spring loveliness more lovely than in Westmorland.  The gentle valleys of the Lakes had been muffled in snow and scourged with hail.  The winter furies had made their lairs in the higher fells, and rushed shrieking week after week through delicate and quiet scenes not made for them.  The six months from November to May had been for the dale-dwellers one long endurance.  But in one May week all was forgotten, and atoned for.  Beauty, ‘an hourly presence,’ reigned without a rival.  From the purple heights that stand about Langdale and Derwentwater, to the little ferns and mountain plants that crept on every wall, or dipped in every brook, the mountain land was all alive and joyful.  The streams alone made a chorus for the gods.

Hester, who was now a woman of sixty, had reluctantly admitted, by the middle of the month, that, after a long winter spent in a munition factory and a Lancashire town, employed on the most strenuous work that she, an honest worker all her life, had ever known, a fortnight’s holiday was reasonable.  And she wrote to Nelly Sarratt, just as she was departing northwards, to say—­cunningly—­that she was very tired and run down, and would Nelly come and look after her for a little?  It was the first kindness she had ever asked of Nelly, to whom she had done so many.  Nelly telegraphed in reply that in two days she would be at Rydal.

Hester spent the two days in an expectation half-eager, half-anxious.  It had been agreed between them that in their correspondence the subject of Nelly’s health was to be tabooed.  In case of a serious breakdown, the Commandant of Nelly’s hospital would write.  Otherwise there were to be no enquiries and no sympathy.  Cicely Marsworth before her marriage in early March had seen Nelly twice and had reported—­against the grain—­that although ‘most unbecomingly thin,’ the obstinate little creature said she was well, and apparently was well.  Everybody in the hospital, said Cicely, was at Nelly’s feet.  ’It is of course nonsense for her to lay down, that she won’t be petted, Nature has settled that for her.  However, I am bound to say it is the one thing that makes her angry, and the nurses are all amazed at what she has been able to stand.  There is a half-blind boy, suffering from “shock” in one of the wards, to whom they say she has devoted herself for months.  She has taught him to speak again, and to walk, and the nerve-specialist who has been looking after the poor fellow told her he would