I remember the particular morning when she was taken ill. It was a tremendously hot day in June. Jimmy was sitting on the wooden bench by the garden door, with his thin hands spread out on his knees to bake in the sun. I was hanging about the garden, and longing to get back to the Inn. Mrs. Covey came out from the dairy with a dish clout in her hand. She began to vigorously “shoo” a fine cock from the strawberry bed. I can see her now, with her bent back in the brownish bodice and triangular-folded scarlet shawl. She went back to the house between rows of podded broad beans. When she cried out to the cock--who was a gay fellow, all brown and burnish--it was a queer, unwomanly cry. No doubt she knew the note with which to scare him. He went racing back to the yard, all tail feathers, swinging comb, and indignant cackle. An hour afterward she fell on the flagstones by the back door. She had been very busy making jelly of windfall apples. Apoplexy gripped her, and she fell, a droll-looking, lop-sided heap, on the stones. That was a long, hot, empty day. Jimmy was fretful and selfish, after the manner of chronic invalids. He missed his egg and milk, his jelly, the dozen little dainties that she prepared for him. And I think he was a trifle scared, poor chap, by the very mention of Death--Death, that unpleasant personage, with whom he already had a bowing acquaintance. The doctor came--a hearty country man, in a high, rakish-looking trap. He said there was no hope for her. A woman came in and got her to bed. Her world waited breathlessly, soberly for her to go. Her world--of forty acres or so--was waiting stolidly. Birds in the wood--metallic finches, throaty wood pigeons, the persistent cuckoo, called across the branches and the long, rank grass of her. She had known so many generations of birds. Out by the back door everything was eloquent of her: pans of unskimmed milk in the dairy, the preserving pan, with a wooden skimmer set in syrup. Jimmy crawled up the white road in the sun to the public house. But I stayed behind. I was fond of the queer old woman, and I thought that perhaps I might come in useful. Zak said moodily that it was an awkward time of the year for illness. He didn’t put it in words, but I knew his thought--that it was inconsiderate of her to take to dying in the middle of haymaking. In the orchard was the awning which she had roughly rigged up for the haymakers--but who was to get the men’s tea? The grass in the eight-acre meadow had been left until the last. There was a merry jingle as the machine rattled and rocked along.