“I must go and tell his mother,” she kept repeating, when Nell had read the telegram, and had set about, with true female instinct, to make her a cup of tea. “Don’t you worry over that, dear—I’ll tell her.” “Reckon he’d sooner I did.” “No—no; it would be such a strain for you. I’ll go when I’ve made your tea.” At that moment little Will woke up, and cried for his breakfast—his mother had forgotten him for the first time since he was born. Nell welcomed the distraction, though her heart tightened as she saw Thyrza’s arms sweep to the child, and quiver while she held him with his little cool tear-dabbled cheek against her own so tearless and so dry. Nell left her with the boy at her breast, a big yellow hank of hair adrift upon her shoulder, and her eyes staring from under the tangle, fixed, strangely dark, strangely bright, as if their grief were both a shadow and an illumination. She herself ran back on her self-inflicted errand, all her being merged into the one pain of knowing that in ten minutes she would have turned a jogging peace to bitterness, and bankrupted her mother’s life of its chief treasure. She saw herself as a flame leaping from one burning house to set another light. Mrs. Beatup’s reception of the news held both the expected and the unexpected. “I knew it,” she said stonily—“I felt it—I felt it in my boans. And I toald him, too—I told him, poor soul, as he’d never come back, and now he’ll never come, surelye.” Then she said suddenly—“I mun go to her.” “Go to whom, mother dear?” “Thyrza. He’d want it ... and reckon she feels it even wuss than me.” Nothing could dissuade her, and off she went, to comfort the woman with whom she had so long played tug-of-war for her son. Nell stayed behind in the dreary house, where it seemed as if things slunk and crept. It was holiday-time, so Zacky was at home, sobbing in a corner of the haystack, crying on and on monotonously till he scarcely knew what he cried for, then suddenly charmed out of his grief by a big rat that popped out of the straw and ran across his legs. Elphick and Juglery mumbled and grumbled together in the barn, and talked of the shame of a yeoman dying out of his bed, and cast deprecating eyes on the indecency of Harry, dark against the sky on the ribbed swell of the Street field, making his late sowings with the new boy at his heels. Up and down the furrows went Harry, with his head hung low, in his ears the mutter of the guns, so faint on the windless April noon that he sometimes thought they were just the sorrowful beating of his own heart—up and down, scattering seed into the earth, leaving his token of life in the fields he loved before he was himself taken up and cast, vital and insignificant as a seed, into the furrows of Aceldama or the Field of Blood....