“Well, he’s done enough harm for one day.  I’m off to Piping Tree for Dr. Fairley.”

But two hours later, when he returned, with the physician on horseback at his side, Mr. Mullen’s driving, like most earnest yet ignorant endeavours, had already resulted in disaster.  All night they worked over Judy, who continued to stare through them, as though they were but shadows which prevented her from seeing the object for which she was looking.  Then at sunrise, having brought a still-born child into the world, she turned her face to the wall and passed out of it in search of the adventure that she had missed.

CHAPTER XIII

WHAT LIFE TEACHES

Judy was laid away amid the low green ridges in the churchyard, where the drowsy hum of the threshing in a wheatfield across the road, was the only reminder of the serious business of life.  And immediately, as if the beneficent green had enveloped her memory, her weaknesses were effaced and her virtues were exalted in the minds of the living.  Their judgment was softened by a vague feeling of awe, but they were not troubled, while they stood in a solemn and curious row around her grave, by any sense of the pathetic futility of individual suffering in the midst of a universe that creates and destroys in swarms.  The mystery aroused no wonder in their thoughts, for the blindness of habit, which passes generally for the vision of faith, had paralyzed in youth their groping spiritual impulses.

On the following Sunday, before leaving for fresher fields, Mr. Mullen preached a sermon which established him forever in the hearts of his congregation, and in the course of it, he alluded tenderly to “the exalted Christian woman who has been recently removed from among us to a brighter sphere.”  It was, on the whole as Mrs. Gay observed afterwards, “his most remarkable effort”; and even Sarah Revercomb, who had heard that her daughter-in-law was to be mentioned in the pulpit, and had attended from the same spiritual pride with which she had read the funeral notice in the Applegate papers, admitted on her way home that she “wished poor Judy could have heard him.”  In spite of the young woman’s removal to a sphere which Mr. Mullen had described as “brighter,” she had become from the instant of her decease, “poor Judy” in Sarah’s thoughts as well as on her lips.

To Abel her death had brought a shock which was not so much a sense of personal regret, as an intensified expression of the pity he had felt for her while she lived.  The huddled figure against the mill-stone had acquired a new significance in the act of dying.  A dignity which had never been hers in life, enfolded her when she lay with the accusing and hostile look in her face fading slowly into an expression of peace.  With the noble inconsistency of a generous heart, he began to regard Judy dead with a tenderness he had never been able to feel for Judy living.  The less she demanded of him, the more he was ready to give her.