‘What is yours like then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But,’ I said, turning to my uncle, ‘if her body goes to the grave, and her soul to heaven, what’s to become of poor grannie—without either of them, you see?’
My uncle had been thinking while we talked.
‘That can’t be the way to represent the thing, Jane; it puzzles the child. No, Willie; grannie’s body goes to the grave, but grannie herself is gone to heaven. What people call her soul is just grannie herself.’
‘Why don’t they say so, then?’
My uncle fell a-thinking again. He did not, however, answer this last question, for I suspect he found that it would not be good for me to know the real cause—namely, that people hardly believed it, and therefore did not say it. Most people believe far more in their bodies than in their souls. What my uncle did say was—
‘I hardly know. But grannie’s gone to heaven anyhow.’
‘I’m so glad!’ I said. ‘She will be more comfortable there. She was too old, you know, uncle.’
He made no reply. My aunt’s apron was covering her face, and when she took it away, I observed that those eager almost angry eyes were red with weeping. I began to feel a movement at my heart, the first fluttering physical sign of a waking love towards her. ‘Don’t cry, auntie,’ I said. ‘I don’t see anything to cry about. Grannie has got what she wanted.’