"Ay. Do you remember when you brought him home—last spring, wasn't it? Ah, but that's a while back."
"Do you remember?" The road was dipping towards the valley where the cross-roads met. All her life, Mary thought, when she passed them, she would see the stoop of slender shoulders, and the back of a red head in a misty circle of lantern-light. She looked sideways at John's bulky figure, lolling on the seat where once David had sat.
"Oh, yes, let me see, that was in the spring, wasn't it?" she replied.
It was strange, how things could happen which seemed to turn the world upside down, and yet the people who saw one every day never noticed.
"... Anyone with my beautiful disposition has to have some physical disability to counteract it." ... Imagine John ever saying anything as silly as that! John never said anything silly. That was the worst of him.
Then something that she had been wanting to say all day recurred to her. "John, I was talking to Mr. Slater in church last night. He says you mentioned in the parish meeting that you'd like to retire from Anderby. Is that true?"
"Well, I don't know if I said those exact words."
"But did you mean it?"
"Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that. But I was talking it over with Sarah Bannister that time she came to see me when I was in bed...."
"Oh, I see," said Mary.