It was quite night.  The lights were put out in the lane.  Jeannot, with Father Francis, prayed before the shrine of the Seven Sorrows.  Mere Krebs slumbered in her rush-bottomed chair; she was old and worked hard.  The starling was awake.

Bebee rose in her bed, and looked around, as she had done when she had asked for the moss-rosebud.

A sense of unutterable universal pain ached over all her body.

She did not see her little home, its four white walls, its lattice shining in the moon, its wooden bowls and plates, its oaken shelf and presses, its plain familiar things that once had been so dear,—­she did not see them; she only saw the brown woman with her arm about his throat.

She sat up in her bed and slipped her feet on to the floor; the pretty little rosy feet that he had used to want to clothe in silken stockings.

Poor little feet! she felt a curious compassion for them; they had served her so well, and they were so tired.

She sat up a moment with that curious dull agony, aching everywhere in body and in brain.  She kissed the rosebud once more and laid it gently down in the wooden shoe.  She did not see anything that was around her.  She felt a great dulness that closed in on her, a great weight that was like iron on her head.

She thought she was in the strange, noisy, cruel city, with’ the river close to her, and all her dead dreams drifting down it like murdered children, whilst that woman kissed him.

She slipped her feet on to the floor, and rose and stood upright.  There was a door open to the moonlight—­the door where she had sat spinning and singing in a thousand happy days; the lavender blew; the tall, unbudded green lilies swayed in the wind; she looked at them, and knew none of them.

The night air drifted through her linen dress, and played on her bare arms, and lifted the curls of her hair; the same air that had played with her so many times out of mind when she had been a little tottering thing that measured its height by the red rosebush.  But it brought her no sense of where she was.

All she saw was the woman who kissed him.

There was the water beyond; the kindly calm water, all green with the moss and the nests of the ouzels and the boughs of the hazels and willows, where the swans were asleep in the reeds, and the broad lilies spread wide and cool.

But she did not see any memory in it.  She thought it was the cruel gray river in the strange white city:  and she cried to it; and went out into the old familiar ways, and knew none of them; and ran feebly yet fleetly through the bushes and flowers, looking up once at the stars with a helpless broken blind look, like a thing that is dying.

“He does not want me!” she said to them; “he does not want me!—­other women kiss him there!”

Then with a low fluttering sound like a bird’s when its wings are shot, and yet it tries to rise, she hovered a moment over the water, and stretched her arms out to it.