Well, she was alone now, if ever a woman was.
She stood staring straight in front of her, out of the little flower-pot obscured window, into the far distances of the Marsh. Once more the Marsh wore its strange, occasional look of being under the sea, but this time it was her own tears that had drowned it.
"Child—what if the old floods came again?" she seemed to hear Martin's voice as it had spoken in a far-off, half forgotten time.... He had talked to her about those old floods, he had said they might come again, and she had said they couldn't.... My! How they used to argue together in those days. He had said that if the floods came back to drown the Marsh, all the church bells would ring under the sea....
She liked thinking of Martin in this way—it comforted her. It made her feel as if, now that everything had been taken from her, the past so long lost had been given back. And not the past only, for if her memories lived, her hopes lived too—not even Ellen's bitterness could kill them.... There she stood, nearly forty years old, on the threshold of an entirely new life—her lover, her sister, her farm, her home, her good name, all lost. But the past and the future still were hers.