Then did the sun appear above the dark woods and countless villages, high, mighty, shedding warmth below—the eye of God’s own mercy—and commence its reign, its peaceful gentle mastery over all the land. It was just then that Agata, the Klembas’ aged kinswoman, made her appearance upon a sandhill near the forest, where several stacks belonging to the Manor stood by a roadway full of deep ruts. In early autumn she had started on her pilgrimage of beggary, and eaten “bread of our Lord’s giving” ever since. And now she had come back, just like those homing birds that always find their nests again in spring. Old, feeble, very short of breath, and something like a roadside willow, rooted in the sand, decrepit, phosphorescent, tottering to its fall—she walked all in rags, staff in hand, wallet on back, and a rosary dangling at her side. The sun was rising when she passed the Manor stacks with quick short steps, raising her weatherbeaten shrivelled face to the sun, while her grey eyes, though bloodshot, sparkled bright with joy. Ah! Back again in her native village, after the long hard winter!—The thought gave wings to her feet; her wallet jogged upon her shoulders, and her beads tinkled at her side: but soon her breath grew short, her labouring lungs failed her, and she had perforce to stop and then go on more slowly and painfully. But her hungry eyes scoured the country round; she smiled on those grey fields, now greenish with a haze of growing corn; on the villages, coming little by little out of the enveloping fog; on those trees, as yet bare of foliage, that stood as guardians of the road, and on those others, scattered solitary about the plain. By this time the sun was pretty high, and cast its beams over the farthest fields of all. The whole country gleamed with rosy dew; the black ploughed lands shone in light, the waters glittered, streaming by in the ditches, the voices of the larks rang loud through the cool air. Farther, beneath some outjutting crags, the last patches of vanishing snow still glistened. On a few trees there hung clusters of yellow catkins that dangled in air like amber beads. In certain nooks, and from the beds of pools drying in the sun, young grass with golden blades was springing up amongst last year’s dry rust-coloured leaves, or wild flowers were opening their yellow eyes. A light breeze had caught up the rich dank odours of the plain that basked idly in the sunlight; and everything around was so bright, so vast, and full of such delicious sweetness that Agata would fain have had wings, to soar upwards with a great cry of joy and rapture. “O good Lord! O dear Jesus!” she gasped, sitting down to take the whole view, as it were, into her tender heart that throbbed with gladness.