His wife nodded.
"Well, who do you suppose sent them? Who would ever think of sending them?"
Mrs. Motherwell made no reply.
"It's a blamed nice letter anyway," he said, looking it over again, "I guess Polly didn't give us a hard name to them up there in the 'ospital, or we wouldn't ha' got a letter like this; and poor Polly's dead. Well, she was a kind of a good-natured, willin' thing too, and not too slow either."
Mrs. Motherwell was still silent. She had not thought that Polly would die, she had always had great faith in the vitality of English people. "You can't kill them," she had often said; but now Polly was dead. She was sick, then, when she went around the house so strangely silent and flushed. Mrs. Motherwell's memory went back with cruel distinctness—she had said things to Polly then that stung her now with a remorse that was new and terrible, and Polly had looked at her dazed and wondering, her big eyes flushed and pleading. Mrs. Motherwell remembered now that she had seen that look once before. She had helped Sam to kill a lamb once, and it came back to her now, how through it all, until the blow fell, the lamb had stood wondering, pleading, yet unflinching, and she had run sobbing away—and now Polly was dead—and those big eyes she had so often seen tearful, yet smiling, were closed and their tears forever wiped away.
That night she dreamed of Polly, confused, troubled dreams; now it was Polly's mother who was dead, then it was her own mother, dead thirty years ago. Once she started violently and sat up. Someone had been singing—the echo of it was still in the room:
Over my grave keep the green willers growing.
The yellow harvest moon flooded the room with its soft light. She could see through the window how it lay like a mantle on the silent fields. It was one of those glorious, cloudless nights, with a hint of frost in the air that come just as the grain is ripening. From some place down the creek a dog barked; once in a while a cow-bell tinkled: a horse stamped in the stable and then all was still. Numberless stars shone through the window. The mystery of life and death and growing things was around her. As for man his days are as grass; as a flower of the field so he flourisheth—for it is soon cut off and we fly away—fly away where?—where?—her head throbbed with the question.
The eastern sky flushed red with morning; a little ripple came over the grain. She watched it listlessly. Polly had died at daybreak—didn't the letter say? Just like that, the light rising redder and redder, the stars disappearing, she wondered dully to herself how often she would see the light coming, like this, and yet, and yet, some time would be the last, and then what?
We shall be where suns are not,
A far serener clime.