Anne Hilton was walking home in the cool night air.  The stars were so clear that they seemed to rest on the fields and tree-tops, and the rustle of the sleepless corn passed behind every hedge.  She walked with a certain carefulness as of one who had unexpectedly escaped a physical danger; but the peril from which she was conscious of fleeing was spiritual.  She had been threatened by avarice which had prompted her to give a small sum instead of the sovereign, and the evangelist had been right in his intuition.  It had needed a good deal of “making up her mind” to give away the greater part of her earnings, even under the warmth of human appeal.  She had conquered, but narrowly, and there was as much shame as satisfaction in her heart as she left the building, and more than all a great fear lest it should be talked about.

CHAPTER XVII

It was the first day of spring, the season of swift changes.  For the first time the sky was lighter than the ground.  Its brilliant clouds threw heavy shadows on the earth, fugitive shadows which ran with the warm wind, alert with colour.  Nothing was quiet or hidden.  There was not yet sufficient life to cover or screen.  Everything that had budded had a world to itself and could be seen.  Radiant, innocent, carolling, self-revealing, the movement and action of spring were in the earth.  The running and glittering water, in winter so vivid a feature of the fields, had become insignificant in comparison with the splendid and vigorous sky.  The noise of the wind, too, beat in one’s ears louder than the water.  One had no time for meditation.  One was hurried as the wind, speeding as the sunshine.  Yet the spring more than any other season is the time when one thinks of the generations that pass—­perhaps from the very transitoriness of the visual images, their evanescence and momentary changes reminding one so of the dead.  In autumn the passage is grave and decorous, like the advance of old age.  In spring the image is lovely and momentary, like the bright passage of those dead young.

Anne Hilton looked out to see what kind of weather it was for the market, and with a sudden pang, she remembered her old father, and how, on such a day, he would totter to the open door, and there sit in the sunshine, grateful for the same warmth for which his old dog was grateful.  When she came home from the market, she would make a wreath of white holly to put on the grave in which he rested.  She thought of him vividly, of the pathos of his last illness from which she had vainly tried to drive the fear and soften the pain.  She remembered his slow laugh, and the knocking of his stick on the floor.  Memory is keener in bright sunshine than in the twilight, in vivid enjoyment more poignant than in melancholy.  The churchyard, with its unvisited green mound and dwelling of the silent, became visible to Anne, and with it the dying out of joy which returns with that vision and memory.  The house, too, was very quiet, as she drew in her head, with the stillness of a place once lived in and now empty.  She had become accustomed to thinking of her father with tranquillity, satisfied to believe him at rest.  Now the pain of loneliness returned with memory.