The sight of the haunted face that bore such a likeness to Poor Stephen set her thinking again of the sad photograph in his mother’s room. Absurd as it seemed now, she had felt, at the time, as if it had wished her to take it away. Yet most people going in—people like his lordship, for instance—and seeing it in its silver frame, would never doubt for a moment that Emma had loved her son. They would take off their hats, as it were, to her glory and grief. Even if you had told them the truth, and with an army of witnesses at your back, they would still have averred that at least Emma was sorry now. Yet nobody who had known her as Mrs. Clapham had known her would believe that it was possible for her to be really sorry. It was true that Mrs. Tanner had hinted at some such possibility only that morning, but she herself would be the first to say that she had meant nothing by it. As for the charwoman, whose love for her only child was as crystal-clear as running water, she could see nothing that looked even remotely like love in the sorrowing Emma. She was not the only one, of course, who had been puzzled of late by the queer psychology of war-time love. So much of it seemed to be merely clutching and coarse, as if it was the body that mattered and not the soul. Emma, indeed, seemed to be still clutching at Stephen even after his body was gone, and not only clutching at Stephen but his widow and children as well.... She met nobody else while she was crossing the fields, and presently even the young soldier who was so like Stephen became fused with him in her mind, so that she thought of him by the end as no more than a photograph or a ghost. The sense of poverty and humiliation which had so oppressed her in Emma’s left her completely now she was in the open. Indeed, she seemed to herself to grow bigger and more important with every step, and as if the very cattle grazing on either side were there merely to pay her tribute. The birds sang for her, the flowers grew for her, the long slopes of grass were green. She was the fortunate being whom the gods had decided to bless, and as such she loomed large as the broad universe and high as the tall sky.