member of the Farmers’ Club.  He had also woken in her certain simple cravings—­for a man’s strong arm round her and his shoulder under her cheek.  She had now to make the humiliating discovery that the husk of such a need can remain after the creating spirit had left it.  In the course of the next year she had one or two small, rather undignified flirtations with neighbouring farmers—­there was young Gain over at Botolph’s Bridge, and Ernest Noakes of Belgar.  They did not last long, and she finally abandoned both in disgust, but a side of her, always active unconsciously, was now disturbingly awake, requiring more concrete satisfactions than the veiled, self-deceiving episode of Socknersh.

She was ashamed of this.  And it made her withdraw from comforts she might have had.  She never went to North Farthing House, where she could have talked about Martin with the one person who—­as it happened—­would have understood her treacheries.  Lawrence came to see her once at the end of September, but she was gruff and silent.  She recoiled from his efforts to break the barriers between life and death; he wanted her to give Martin her thoughts and her prayers just as if he were alive.  But she “didn’t hold with praying for the dead”—­the Lion and the Unicorn would certainly disapprove of such an act; and Martin was now robed in white, with a crown on his head and a harp in his hand and a new song in his mouth—­he had no need of the prayers of Joanna Godden’s unfaithful lips.  As for her thoughts, by the same token she could not think of him as he was now; that radiant being in glistening white was beyond the soft approaches of imagination—­robed and crowned, he could scarcely be expected to remember himself in a tweed suit and muddy boots kissing a flushed and hot Joanna on the lonely innings by Beggar’s Bush.  No, Martin was gone—­gone beyond thought and prayer—­gone to sing hymns for ever and ever—­he who could never abide them on earth—­gone to forget Joanna in the company of angels—­pictured uncomfortably by her as females, who would be sure to tell him that she had let Thomas Gain kiss her in the barn over at Botolph’s Bridge....

She could not think of him as he was now, remote and white, and she could bear still less to think of him as he had been once, warm and loving, with his caressing hands and untidy hair, with his flushed cheek pressed against hers, and the good smell of his clothes—­with his living mouth closing slowly down on hers ... no, earth was even sharper than heaven.  All she had of him in which her memory and her love could find rest were those few common things they keep to remember their dead by on the Marsh—­a memorial card, thickly edged with black, which she had had printed at her own expense, since apparently such things were no part of the mourning of North Farthing House; his photograph in a black frame; his grave in Brodnyx churchyard, in the shadow of the black, three-hooded tower, and not very far from the altar-tomb on which he had sat and waited for her that Christmas morning.