Mattie sobbed again, remembering the enraptured hours in which that miracle had happened, and realising that, now that she was a prisoner once more, the enchantment would have passed for ever. “It was just because I was going to get away from it,” she wept; “that’s all. To-morrow it’ll all be nasty, just as before.” “It’ll never be just as nasty, Mattie, whatever you think,” Kirkby said firmly. “Once you’ve looked at a thing with love, you never rightly forget it. It comes creeping back into your heart, no matter how often you turn it out.” She said nothing to that, and presently he went on again, speaking in a dreamy tone as if he were weaving a spell of some sort about her, and as if the sentences were being dropped by something outside him into his tired brain. “We’ve not done so badly together, Mattie, you and me, when you come to think of it. We’ve quarrelled a deal about this Canadian business, I know that, but we’ve not done so badly, all told. We’ve had a good life together in a beautiful place, which is more than a lot of folks get. We’ve been God-fearing folk, on the whole, and we’ve as good children as ever stepped. We’ve had a good life, Mattie, and we’ve been together a long while. Children matter a sight, I know, but we matter to each other more. We’ve made something between us in this spot as we’ll never have anywhere else. We’ve made our lives.... When folks get to the end of things, all that they’ve got left to them is just their lives....” She had ceased crying long before he stopped, only sighing and bowing her head upon her hand as she had done at the beginning. Her mind, utterly wearied and over-strained, had for compensation that curious quality peculiar to extreme exhaustion of seeing clear in flashes. By virtue of those flashes, so much more vivid and poignant than those of the normal course of thought, she was able for the first time to see life as Kirkby saw it. For the first time she saw the dignity and the beauty of the life to which he clung, and to which such characters as his own owed their inward essence. Canada had gone out of her, as he had hoped, and into the great space which it had left flowed Kirkby and his gardens.