Once she had gone back to Kilrathy, the place of her birth, and revisited the pastures, the woods, the streams, which she had known in girlhood. The big house in the midst of the green lands was shut up; bad times had told there as in so many other places in the land; the family she had served was abroad, impoverished, alienated, and all but forgotten. But nothing else was changed. The same great trees spread their vast shadows above the grass; the same footpaths ran through the meadows; the same kind of herds fed lazily, hock deep in clover, the rain shining on their sleek sides, their breath odorous on the misty air; the same kind of birds sang above her head. Every step of the way was familiar to her: here was the stile where she had listened first to William’s wooing; there the footbridge which she had crossed every market day; here the black hazel coppice where she had once lost a silver sixpence; there the old oak stump where the red cow had been suddenly taken with labor pains; the rich long grass, the soft grey rain, the noisy frogs in the marsh, the brimming river with the trout up-leaping amongst the sword rush and the dock leaves--all these and a thousand other familiar things were just as they had been five-and-thirty years before; but none of the people guessed that the lonely lady so richly dressed, walking silently through the water meadows, had once been Margaret Hogan. She did not dare make herself known to any of them; she stole into the churchyard and sat by her parents’ graves in the dusk, and gathered a few daisies off the nameless mounds, and stole away again feeling ashamed as of some overt act. She saw a barelegged girl going home with the cattle, a switch in her hand and a gleam of sunset light coming through the rain-clouds and touching her red hair and her red kirtle; and in an odd breathless, senseless kind of ingratitude to fate, she wished that her Kathleen--Katherine--were that cow-girl, threading that fragrant twilit path with the gentle kine lowing about her, and a little calf nibbling at a bunch of clover in her hand. “’Twas a good life when all was said,” she murmured, a good life, washed by the dews, freshened with the winds, sweetened by the flowers. She left a bank note at the poor-box of the little church, and returned to her grandeur and greatness, bearing in memory for many a day that pleasant sound of the cattle chewing the wet grasses in the dusk, smelling in memory for many a day the honey scent of the cowslips in the wide pastures by the river. Those memories were shut up in her heart in secret; she would not have dared to speak of them to her husband, or her daughter, but they were there, as the withered daisies were in the secret drawer of her dressing-case; and they kept a little corner of feeling alive in her poor puffed-out stiffened overstretched soul, so overweighted with its cares and honors.