Rising she stood up and looked about her, absorbing the down-land, familiar and beloved from childhood. The sky, grey now and mottled, drooped about her quietly with the soft wings of a mothering bird settling soft-breasted on her nest. The good green earth, firm beneath her feet, lifted her up into the quiet refuge of that welcoming bosom, lifted her to meet it like a wave gently swelling. So it had always been: so it always would be. This earth she knew and loved so well was not alien, it was not hostile; rather it was flesh of her flesh and soul of her soul. It gave her strength and comfort. Her bosom rose and fell in time, so it seemed to her, with the rise and fall of the breast of this virgin-mother, whose goodness she assimilated through heart and eyes and nostrils. She felt utterly at home. All sense of separation, of dissent, had left her. Absorbed she stood, and absorbing. These woman-bodied hills, sparsely clad in rags of gorse that served only to enhance their loveliness, brought her solace and content as did nothing else. So it had always been: so it always would be. The beauty and wonder of them rolled in upon her in waves of sound-less music, sluicing over the sands of her life in foaming sheets of hyacinth, drowning the resentment, filling and fulfilling her with the grand harmony of life. Sometimes down in the Moot, amid the worry, and the tumult, and the exasperations, she became empty, a discord, a desert. Then she would get away for an hour among the hills and her parched spirit found instant refreshment. She brimmed again. The quiet, the comfort, the deep abiding wonder of it all came back to her; even the words which she always associated with it--_I am the Resurrection and the Life_. Since Ernie's departure the Comforter had come thus to her with renewed power; as if knowing her need and resolute to fortify her in the hour of her ordeal. Standing there upon the brow, Ernie's letter lying like his hand upon her breast in the old dear way, she gazed across the waters, dimming in the dusk, and sent out her heart towards him, strong and pulsing as the sun's rays at dawn seen by some mountaineer from his native peak. She could shield him so that no evil thing could come nigh him. She had no fear for him and was amazed at her own triumphant faith. Established on the rock herself, earth in earth, spirit in spirit, invincibly secure, she had him safe in her keeping, safe, aye safe as his child quickening in the warm and sheltered darkness of her womb. Headley Bros., Ashford, Kent, & 18 Devonshire St., E.C.2.