The blue smoke rose straight up from the house of death, over there in the white fields, where the wife sat and looked at the dead. Everyone else was talking of the strange life just ended, but the woman who had shared it would tell nothing; she wished only to persuade us that in spite of his extraordinary life he was a good man and very good to her. She had become as silent as Morgan himself, though eleven years before, when she began to live with him on the mountain, she was a happy, gay woman, the best dancer and singer in the village, and had the most lovers. Upon the mountain her wholly black Silurian eyes had turned inwards and taught her lips their mystery and Morgan’s. They buried him, according to his wish, at the foot of the tower. Outraged by this, some of the neighbours removed his body to the churchyard under the cover of night. Others equally enraged at putting such a one in consecrated ground, exhumed him again. But in the end it was in the churchyard that his bones came to rest, with the inscription, chosen by Ann: “Though thou shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord.” Angharad married a pious eccentric much older than herself, and in a year inherited his money. She lives on in one of those gray houses which make Queen Street so stately at Abercorran. She keeps no company but that of the dead. The children call her Angharad of the Folly, or simply Angharad Folly. “She ought to have gone back to the tower,” said Mr Torrance in some anger. “She would have done, Mr Torrance,” said Ann, “if she had been a poet; but you would not have done it if you had been through those eleven years and those four nights. No, I really don’t think you would.... I knew a poet who jumped into a girl’s grave, but he was not buried with her. Now you are angry with him, poor fellow, because he did not insist on being buried. Well, but it is lucky he was not, because if he had been we should not have known he was a poet.” “Well said, Ann,” muttered Aurelius. “Ann forgets that she was young once,” protested Mr Torrance. “No,” she said, “I don’t think I do, but I think this, that you forget you will some day be old. Now, as this is Shrove Tuesday and you will be wanting pancakes I must go make them.” “Good old Ann,” whispered Mr Torrance. CHAPTER IX MR TORRANCE THE CHEERFUL MAN Mr Torrance openly objected to Ann’s epitaph for David Morgan, preferring his own choice of one from Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”: “And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy?” “But” said Mr Morgan, “Shelley was born only a hundred years ago, and died at thirty, I think that in the matter of mountains an older man is better.” “But, father,” said Roland, “how do you know that Jeremiah was not drowned at thirty with a copy of ‘Ecclesiastes’ clasped to his bosom?”