The day before the funeral the mother took no food, and entered upon that nervous, neurotic period common to the time. She never sat down. She roamed for miles in the narrow space of the house and garden. She arranged and rearranged the flowers on the coffin; she magnified small griefs and temporary inconveniences. She quarrelled bitterly with the undertaker that the lining of the little box was cheaper than she had directed. She found a small flaw also upon the lid. This was concealed with putty, and Honor called down the wrath of the Everlasting upon the carpenter who had made it. A master sorrow in the minor sort now fell upon her. There is a belief on Dartmoor that if a little boy dies, he should be carried to his grave by little girls, and when a small maid passes it is thought good if boys are her bearers. Honor hugged this tradition as a precious and seemly observance; but it chanced that of small girls in Postbridge there were then but four, and the task she desired to set them would need six pairs of hands. The misfortune swiftly mounted into a tragedy when viewed from her distracted standpoint. Her unrestrained grief grew voluble; she mourned her lot to any who would listen. From the first storm of weeping and the first desire for peace and loneliness she became talkative, and, in a condition of sustained incoherence, chattered, light-headed, from morning until night. She was rude to the clergyman when he came to see her. Her friends suggested that two more little girls should be obtained from Princetown, or some neighbouring hamlet; but the poor soul explained that this rite allowed of no such deviation. The children must be those who had known her dead baby, and actually played with him. Others would not answer the proper purpose. Upon the night before the funeral the undertaker went home a shattered man, for the matter of this tiny corpse had troubled him, and such failure to satisfy the parent hurt his professional feelings. “There wasn’t half the difficulties when us laid by His Honour, Lord Champernowne, Peer of the Realm and J.P., an’ ten coaches, an’ a letter of thanks after from the steward,” he grumbled to his wife. But she comforted him. “The woman’s stark, staring mad, my dear. Don’t think no more about her. If you’d lined the casket with shining gold, her’d have grumbled because there weren’t no diamonds in it. An’ all for two pound, ten. ’Twas like your big heart to use elm, when any other man would have made deal do very nice.” Meantime, at the hour of gloaming, as Dartmoor vanished fold upon fold into the purple of night, did Avisa Mogridge pluck heart, and cross the high road, and enter her neighbour’s house. She did not knock, but lifted the latch boldly, walked in and stood before Honor, where the unhappy mother sat and worked upon a black bonnet by candle-light. “You! You to come! You, as may be a witch an’ overlooked my li’l darling, for all I know!” she cried, leaping to her feet.