Yes, it was sad ... and now she was being punished for it; but wrapped up in her punishment, sweetening its very heart, was a comfort she did not deserve. Ansdore was slowly fading in her thoughts, as it had always faded in the presence of any vital instinct, whether of love or death. Ansdore could never be to her what her child would be--none of her men, except perhaps Martin, could have been to her what her child would be.... "If it's a boy I'll call it Martin--if it's a girl I'll call it Ellen," he said to herself. Then she doubted whether Ellen would appreciate the compliment ... but she would not let herself think of Ellen to-night. That was to-morrow's evil. "I'll have to make some sort of a plan, though--I'll have to sell this place and give Ellen a share of it. And me--where ull I go?" She must go pretty far, so that when the child came Brodnyx and Pedlinge would not get to know about it. She would have to go at least as far as Brighton ... then she remembered Martha Relf and her lodgings at Chichester--"that wouldn't be bad, to go to Martha just for a start. Me leaving Ansdore for the same reason as she left it thirteen year ago ... that's queer. The mistress who got shut of her, coming to her and saying--'Look here, Martha, take me in, so's I can have my child in peace same as you had yours' ... I should ought to get some stout money for this farm--eight thousand pounds if it's eightpence--though reckon the Government ull want about half of it and we'll have all that terrification started again ... howsumever, I guess I'll get enough of it to live on, even when Ellen has her bit ... and maybe the folk around here ull think I'm sold up because my case has bust me, and that'll save me something of their talk." Well, well, she was doing the best she could--though Lawrence on his blind, obedient way to Africa was scarcely going on a farther, lonelier journey than that on which Joanna was setting out. "Oh, Martin," she whispered, lifting her eyes to his picture on her chest of drawers--"I wish I could feel you close." It was years since she had really let herself think of him, but now strange barriers of thought had broken down, and she seemed to go to and fro quite easily into the past. Whether it was her love for Bertie whom in her blindness she had thought like him, or her meeting with Lawrence, or the new hope within her, she did not trouble to ask--but that strange, long forbidding was gone. She was free to remember all their going out and coming in together, his sweet fiery kisses, the ways of the Marsh that he had made wonderful. Throughout her being there was a strange sense of release--broken, utterly done and finished as she was from the worldly point of view, there was in her heart a springing hope, a sweet softness--she could indeed go softly at last.