He stooped and kissed her. She lifted her hand to touch his cheek, but it fell back helpless. "Hark," she gasped--"the knocking! I--am coming--" then with one long deep sigh, her voice was still for ever. A few moments later, Tom Smith stumbled down the stairs, and out into the darkness and away, never to be seen by Huldah again. She knew and realised nothing then, but that her Aunt Emma was dead, that all her dreams had ended, all her plans for the future were fruitless, that their living together was ended, her home broken up once more. "She's had such a hard life!" she sobbed. "And I thought I was going to make her so happy when she got about a bit again." "But she never would have got about again, dear. She could never have got beyond these rooms, and I feel sure she would always have worried about her husband. She could never have gone about with him again, and she would have fretted at being left behind. She is happy now, brownie, and out of pain. No one who really loved her could wish her back again. Don't grieve so, Huldah dear. You made the last months of her life happier than any she had known." "But I ran away and left her, and he beat her and Charlie for it, and--and--" "Brownie, dear, if you want to do what would have pleased your aunt, you will forget all that. She loved him and forgave him everything, and she longed for others too to forget that he was ever anything but a kind husband." Huldah was silent. She understood the feeling. It was what she wanted everyone to feel with regard to Aunt Emma,--to remember only what was good of her. And she had her wish. The little group gathered in the churchyard a few days later remembered only her suffering and her sorrows, and the love which had lived through all, and many a pretty bunch of winter flowers and leaves and berries were laid on her grave by kindly, pitying hands. In the furthest corner of the little churchyard they laid her, in a corner where the sun rested, and where a hawthorn grew, in which a robin sang hopefully while they laid her to rest. Huldah, standing by the grave-side while the beautiful words of the Burial Service were being read, thought of those other partings, so sad, so cruel,--oh, this was better than those, and not so complete. She could still feel that Aunt Emma was near her, and safe, and in the best of all keeping, at peace for ever and ever. They thought it best that Huldah should not go back to the empty rooms again, and she was glad; so after the service was over she walked back to her old home once again, as though she had never left it, and the last few months had been but a dream. And it was all so like a dream that at the top of the lane she paused and looked about her, half bewildered. Could she be, she asked herself, the same Huldah who not so many months before had stood there a cowed, frightened, hunted thing, starving, exhausted, but minding nothing as long as--as what?