"For his grave?" asked Urith, "and for my baby."
She took them eagerly, began to weave them, then they fell from her fingers into her lap, and she remained unconscious, holding the stalks.
The old lady came to her again, and scolded her.
"There! there! this is too bad. Take your token, and give me the flowers. I must do everything."
She put the broken medal again into Urith's hand; and left her, carrying the flowers away.
Urith was at once back again under her overwhelming cloud—the ever-present conviction that Anthony was dead, and that she had killed him.
She saw him at every moment of the day, except when roused from her dream, lying across the hearthstone with his heart pierced. She had seen a little start of blood from the wound, when it was dealt, and this she saw day and night welling up inexhaustibly in tiny wavelets, flowing over his side, and falling in a long trickle sometimes connected, sometimes a mere drip upon the hearthstone, and then running upon the pavement in a dark line.
This little rill never dried up, never became full; it pushed its way along slowly, always about the breadth of the little finger, and standing up like a surcharged vein, hemmed in by grains of dust and particles of flue. Urith was ever watching the progress of this rivulet of blood, as it stole forward, now turning a little to this side from some knot in the floor, then running into a crevice and staying its onward progress till it had filled the chink, and converted it into a puddle. She watched it rise to the edge of a slate slab, swell above it, tied back, as it were, by each jagged in the slate edge, then overleap it, and run further. The rill was ever advancing towards the main entrance to the hall, yet never reaching it, making its way steadily, yet making no actual progress.
On more than one occasion Urith stooped to remove a dead wasp that stood in the way of its advance, or to sop up with her kerchief some plash of water which would have diluted its richness.
Now, on the floor, lay a daisy head that had fallen from the flower bunch Mistress Penwarne had brought to her and then had taken away. Urith's eyes were on the daisy, and it seemed to her that the red rill was touching it. It was nothing to Urith that she was in the parlour, and that Anthony had fallen in the hall. Wherever she went, into whatsoever room, into the garden, out on the moor—it was ever the hall she was in, and the floor everywhere, whether of oak boards or of soft turf, or of granite spar, was in her eyes the pavement of the hall, and ever over that pavement travelled the little thread of blood, groping its way, like an earthworm, as endowed with a half consciousness that gave it direction without organs of sense.