"What are you thinking of?" she inquired tentatively.
"I be thinkin'," said Mrs. Peverell, "if he gets a good price for that cow we'd have a new lot o' bricks laid down in that wash-house. There be holes there a body might fall over in the dark."
A thousand times more bitter was this than the truth, for still she stood staring inwards with her thoughts and still standing there, with her hand on the back of the chair and her eyes gazing through the window, Mary had left her and gone upstairs.
VII
Soon after John was born, there had come a letter from Hannah saying that she and Fanny were going to stay with friends in Yorkshire and on their way intended to visit her whether she liked it or not.
"Every one knows we're going to Yorkshire," she had written, "so they won't guess we've broken the journey."
Mary smiled. Almost it was unbelievable to her now that once she herself had thought like that. Absolutely and actually unreal it seemed to her now that the human body could so be led and persuaded by the thoughts of its mind.
"Come," she wrote back. "We shall be proud to see you."
"Proud!" said Hannah, reading that. "It almost seems as if she meant to say she was proud of herself. I know she's not ashamed--but proud?"
"P'r'aps that's what she does mean," said Fanny. "Though without love, it doesn't seem to me she's got anything to be proud about."