"At last when your pride shall have brought you to sorrow, And years of remorse and despair been your fate, Perhaps your cold heart will remember Seth's Manor, And turn to your true love--and find it too late." But her mind was too dim even for regrets. Instead, she seemed to see herself dancing with Reuben at Boarzell Fair, when the dusk had been full of strange whirling lights, whispers, and kisses. Dancing!... dancing!... Dying!... dying! Even the tune had faded now, and she could see nothing--only a grey patch where the window had been. She was not frightened, only very lonely. Her legs were like ice, and the inside of her mouth felt all rough and numb. ... Even the window had faded. Her head had fallen sideways on the pillow, and behind Boarzell the sky had kindled into a sheet of soaring triumphant flame. "I live--you die. You die--I live." BOOK III THE ELDER CHILDREN § 1. For some time after Naomi's death Reuben was sick with grief. Her going had been so cruel, so unexpected--and he could not forget how they had found her, her eyelashes wetted with tears. He also missed her in the house--her soft pale face and gentle ways. He forgot the sallowness and the peevishness of later years, and pictured her always with creamy roseal skin and timid voice. He was the only one who missed her. Mrs. Backfield's softer feelings seemed to have been atrophied by hard work--she grew daily more and more like a machine; the children were too young to care much, and Harry was incapable of regret. However, the strange thing about Harry was that he did indeed seem to miss someone, but not Naomi. For the first time since little Fanny's death he began to ask for her, and search for her about the house--"Where's the pretty baby?--oh, save the pretty baby!" he would wail--"she's gone, she's gone--the pretty baby's gone." Reuben, as was usual with him, tried to drown sorrow in hard work. He spent his whole day either in the yard or in the fields or out on Boarzell. He was digging a ditch round his new land, to let off the winter rain, and throughout the cool November damps he was on the Moor, watching the sunset's fiery glow behind the gorse, seeing the red clay squash and crumble thickly under his spade--spouting out drops of blood. In time all this fire and blood brought him back into his old purpose. Gradually the lust of conquest drove away regret. He had no more cause for self-reproach than an officer who loses a good soldier in battle. It is the fortune of war. And Naomi had not died without accomplishing her work and giving him men to help him in the fight.