One day I had to ride over the downs for some letters, and when, on my return, I walked in from the stables, I met her son. He was in tears, and sobbing he said: "My dear old chap, it is all over; she is gone." I took his hand and burst into tears. Then one of her daughters came downstairs and I was told how she had passed away. A few hours before she died she had asked for a silk thread; for thirty years, before sleeping, she always passed one between her beautiful teeth. Her poor arms were shrunken to the very bone and were not larger than a little child's. Haggard and over-worn, she was lifted up, and the silk was given to her and the glass was held before her; but her eyes were glazed with death, and she fell back exhausted. Then her breathing grew thicker, and at last and quite suddenly, she realised that she was about to die; and looking round wildly, not seeing those who were collected about her bed, she said, "Oh, to die when so much remains undone! How will they get on without me!" I helped to write the letters, so melancholy, so conventional, and expressing so little of our grief, and the while the girls sat weaving wreaths for the dead, and at every hour wreaths and letters of sympathy arrived. The girls went upstairs where the dead lay, and when they returned they told me how beautiful their mother looked. And during those dreadful days, how many times did I refuse to look on her dead! My memory of her was an intensely living thing, and I could not be persuaded to sacrifice it. We thought the day would never come, but it came. There was a copious lunch, cigars were smoked, the crops, the price of lambs, and the hunting, which the frost had much interfered with, were alluded to furtively, and the conversation was interspersed with references to the excellent qualities of the deceased. I remember the weather was beautiful, full of pure sunlight, with the colour of the coming spring in the face of the heavens. And the funeral procession wound along the barren sea road, the lily-covered coffin on a trolley drawn by the estate labourers. That day every slightest line and every colour of that bitter, barren coast impressed themselves on my mind, and I saw more distinctly than I had ever done before the old church with red-brown roofs and square dogmatic tower, the forlorn village, the grey undulations of the dreary hills, whose ring of trees showed aloft like a plume. In the church the faces of the girls were discomposed with grief, and they wept hysterically in each other's arms. The querulous voice of the organ, the hideous hymn, and the grating voice of the aged parson standing in white surplice on the altar-steps! Dear heart! I saw thee in thy garden while others looked unto that sunless hole, while old men, white-haired and tottering, impelled by senile curiosity, pressed forward and looked down into that comfortless hole.