For a while I did not seem to believe it; this obviously imminent event stunned me when it came, as though I had never had an anticipatory moment.  For a while I went on working, and then almost apathetically, in a mood of half-reluctant curiosity, I started for Lowchester.

When I got there the last offices were over, and I was shown my old mother’s peaceful white face, very still, but a little cold and stern to me, a little unfamiliar, lying among white flowers.

I went in alone to her, into that quiet room, and stood for a long time by her bedside.  I sat down then and thought. . . .

Then at last, strangely hushed, and with the deeps of my loneliness opening beneath me, I came out of that room and down into the world again, a bright-eyed, active world, very noisy, happy, and busy with its last preparations for the mighty cremation of past and superseded things.

Section 2

I remember that first Beltane festival as the most terribly lonely night in my life.  It stands in my mind in fragments, fragments of intense feeling with forgotten gaps between.

I recall very distinctly being upon the great staircase of Lowchester House (though I don’t remember getting there from the room in which my mother lay), and how upon the landing I met Anna ascending as I came down.  She had but just heard of my return, and she was hurrying upstairs to me.  She stopped and so did I, and we stood and clasped hands, and she scrutinized my face in the way women sometimes do.  So we remained for a second or so.  I could say nothing to her at all, but I could feel the wave of her emotion.  I halted, answered the earnest pressure of her hand, relinquished it, and after a queer second of hesitation went on down, returning to my own preoccupations.  It did not occur to me at all then to ask myself what she might be thinking or feeling.

I remember the corridor full of mellow evening light, and how I went mechanically some paces toward the dining-room.  Then at the sight of the little tables, and a gusty outburst of talking voices as some one in front of me swung the door open and to, I remembered that I did not want to eat. . . .  After that comes an impression of myself walking across the open grass in front of the house, and the purpose I had of getting alone upon the moors, and how somebody passing me said something about a hat.  I had come out without my hat.

A fragment of thought has linked itself with an effect of long shadows upon turf golden with the light of the sinking sun.  The world was singularly empty, I thought, without either Nettie or my mother.  There wasn’t any sense in it any more.  Nettie was already back in my mind then. . . .

Then I am out on the moors.  I avoided the crests where the bonfires were being piled, and sought the lonely places. . . .

I remember very clearly sitting on a gate beyond the park, in a fold just below the crest, that hid the Beacon Hill bonfire and its crowd, and I was looking at and admiring the sunset.  The golden earth and sky seemed like a little bubble that floated in the globe of human futility. . . .  Then in the twilight I walked along an unknown, bat-haunted road between high hedges.