[May raises both her hands in an attitude of supplication.

Steve. [Pausing, with his hand on the burner of the lamp.] Be there summat as you wants what I can give to you?

[May looks at him for a moment and then speaks in a harsh whisper.

May.  Let I bide quiet in the dark, ’tis all I wants now. [Steve puts out the lamp.

Steve. [As though to himself, as he goes towards the door upstairs.] Then get off to your drunken sleep again, and your dreams.

[Curtain.

Act II.—­Scene 4.

The fire is almost out.  A square of moonlight falls on the floor from the window.  Vashti still sleeps in the chimney corner.  May is rocking herself to and fro on the settle.

May.  Get off to your drunken sleep and to your dreams!  Your dreams--your dreams—­Ah, where is it as they have gone, I’d like for to know.  The dreams as comed to I when I was laid beneath the hedge.  Dreams!

[She gets up, feels down the wall in a familiar way for the bellows—­ blows up the fire and puts some coal on it gently.  Then she draws forward a chair and sits down before it.

May. [Muttering to herself.] ’Tis my own hearth when ’tis all said and done.

[She turns up the front of her skirt and warms herself, looking sharply at Vashti Reed now and then.

[Presently VASHTI’S eyes open, resting, at first unseeingly, and then with recognition, on May’s face.

Vashti.  So you be comed back, May.  I always knowed as you would.

May.  How did you know ’twas me, then?

Vashti.  ’Cause I knowed.  There ’tis.

May.  I be that changed from the times when I would sit a-warming of myself by this here fire.

Vashti.  Ah, and be you changed, May?  My eyes don’t see nothing of it, then.

May.  Ah, I be got into an ugly old woman now, mother, and Steve—­ Steve, he looked in the face of I and didn’t so much as think who ’twas.  “Get off to the drunken sleep of you and to your dreams.”  ’Twas that what he did say to I.

Vashti.  Your old mother do know better nor Steve.  Ah, ’tweren’t in no shroud as I seed you, May, nor yet with the sod upon the face of you, but stepping, stepping up and down on the earth, through the water what layed on the roads, and on the dry where there be high places, and in the grass of the meadows.  That’s how ’twas as I did see you, May.

May.  And I would like to know how ’twas as Steve saw I.

Vashti.  Ah, and there was they as did buzz around as thick as waspes in summer time and as said, “She be under ground and rotting now—­ that her be.”  And they seed in I but a poor old woman what was sleeping in the chimney corner, with no hearing to I.  “Rotting yourself,” I says, and I rears up sudden, “She be there as a great tree and all the leaves of it full out—­and you—­snakes in the grass, snakes in the grass, all of you!  There ’tis.