After he left Thurley sat oblivious to telephones or unanswered mail, forgetting the Corners and Miss Clergy and Ali Baba’s pride as he had driven her to the station. She was considering as a judicial gray angel this question of eternally having a good time which was a cancer spot in national common sense.
Now that the tide was turning rapidly towards peace and victory, a call was being made so stupendous and half mystical that perhaps women could best hear and understand since their ears are attuned to children’s unworded, sobbed wants. It was the call to declare themselves as gray angels and to work together for the banishment of the good time menace, to show the world, non-fighting and veterans, that it is good to be ordinary, to return to “life as usual” instead of staying breathless with excitement, unjustly halo-clad, scornful of humdrum duties and rebelling at the inevitable readjustment. By this women should come to see things as they are, not as they would wish them to be.
Dusk crept on Thurley unawares. She started up as the maid came in to hand her a telegram. She knew before she opened it. Miss Clergy was dead.
CHAPTER XXXVII
“She went to sleep-like,” Ali Baba told her, after the simple funeral. “She wasn’t what you would call in pain—just sighing and calling for people dead these forty years. She says to Hopeful, ‘The Watcher of the Dead has seen me’—and we knew then it was the end.”
“What about the watcher of the dead?” Thurley said softly.
“The watcher must have some one to keep him company and when the last one that has died has stayed with him long enough and goes away, they do say the watcher goes about the village looking into faces to see in which lies the shadow of death—and he loses no time in taking him so that he will have company. Miss Clergy remembered the story. She went to sleep sayin’, ‘Tell Thurley—to—use—her—own—judgment.’”
“Ali Baba—did she—” Thurley grasped his arm.