I lay down among the sheaves of wheat that night with no sleep coming to me, for the stars were spilling all out of the sky and it seemed the richness of heaven was flowing down upon us all.
“Michael!” Monk whispered, “she’s a holy-minded girl: look, look, she’s praying!”
Sure enough I could see her a little way off, standing like a saint, as still as a monument.
Fresh as a bird was our gentle comrade in the dawn and ready to be going. And we asked her as we went by the roads together: What was it made her to come the Journey alone?
“Sure there is no loneliness in the world,” she said.
“Is there not?” asked Monk.
“I take my soul with me upon this Journey,” said Mary.
“Your what!”
“My soul,” she said gravely, “it is what keeps loneliness from me.”
He mused upon that a little. “Look ye’re, Mary, soul is just but the chain of eternal mortality, that is what I think it; but you speak as if it were something you pick up and carry about with you, something made of gutta-percha, like a tobacco pouch.”