“And it’ll be worse now than it was before,--a deal worse, a deal harder to bear. There’ll be nothing to hope for, now.... It’ll be just prison again, and the same old life right on to the end. If I’d known things were going to turn out like this, I’d have finished myself long ago!” She was crying now and wringing her hands, stumbling blindly from point to point, and blundering against things in her passage. From time to time she looked wildly from side to side, as if she saw the cottage-walls closing in upon her. From his seat by the table Kirkby sat and watched her, as only the night before he had watched the firelight beat against the ceiling.... She came suddenly to a pause, and, putting out a clenched fist, struck it against the mantelpiece. “I can’t bear it!” she said in a loud tone. “I can’t bear it, and I won’t! There’s my children waiting for me Over There, and I’ll get to them, if I have to walk. It’s my life that I ought to have had, and that I’ve been cheated out of, and I mean to have it.” Her voice rose higher. “What is it goes wrong with things when folks get cheated out of their lives?” Her tone lowered itself then as suddenly as it had risen, and became passionate and pleading. “I take back everything I said just now,” she told him gently. “I want to go....” Turning unsteadily, she came to him, holding out her hands. “You’ll not think any more about what I said? You’ll let us go?” “We’ll go, Mattie. Don’t you fret.” “It’ll be just as it was, this morning?” she pursued, unsatisfied. “The same as it was, last night?” “Just as it was, Mattie.” A smile touched for a moment her tear-wet face, and for the first time he felt the tears spring to his own eyes. She looked at him kindly. “You mustn’t be wild with me for chopping and changing like this. I can’t help it. I’ve got to see ’em all again, and the grandchildren and the houses. I’ve _got_ to see them. You can’t plan and work for a thing all your life, and not get it in the end. It’d kill you, if you didn’t get it,--leastways, it would me.... But I shan’t chop and change again. I’ll get the letter written first thing in the morning, and the one for the passage as well. We must begin thinking about the sale, too, as soon as may be. I did a lot of planning, this afternoon, along with Mrs. Machell. I don’t know that I’m best pleased to think of her living in this house, though _she’s_ pleased enough, to be sure! I near told her to think on it was my home and not hers, and would she kindly remember it? There was the jam an’ all,--I’d nigh forgotten the jam....” Her voice wavered as she spoke, and she looked away from him. “And the privet hedge,--I don’t know how I’ll abide her having the privet hedge.... Len, too, swaggering about the spot, and thinking he’s as good a man as you.... I reckon they’re thinking already we’re as good as overseas----”