“It looks so clean and bright,” said Aderhold, “and your cat purring there on the hearth. Your father went very quickly, and without much suffering. His presence will come back to you, and you will take comfort in it. You will feel it in this room, and upon this doorstep, and out here among the fruit trees, and under the stars at night.” “Aye,” said Joan, “I think it too. But now—” She stood beside him on the doorstep, looking out past the budding trees to the gate and the misty green twisted path that led at last to the village road. Overhead drove a fleecy drift of clouds with islands of blue. “All last night the countryside mourned low and wailed. It was the wind, but I knew it was the other too! It is sad for miles and miles to be so woeful.” “The sickness is greatly lessening. By the time the spring is strongly here it will be over and Hawthorn beginning to forget.—You have been here now three days alone. Has no one come to enquire or help?” “Mother Spuraway from beyond the mill-race came. No one else.” “In a time like this all fear all. But presently friends will find out friends again.” “It is not that way that I am lonely,” said Joan. “There are some that I care not if they never come.” He had his round to go. The sickness in the town dwindling, he had come back, when it broke over Hawthorn, to the Oak Grange. Since then he had gone far and near, wherever it struck down the poorer sort. As he turned from the cottage door, Joan stepped, too, upon the flagged path, and they moved side by side toward the gate, between the lines of green lance-heads the daffodils were thrusting above the soil. They moved in silence, almost of a height, two simply, almost poorly dressed figures, each with its load of sorrow and care for the morrow. And yet they were not old, and about them was the low ecstatic murmur of winter swiftening into spring. “Do you remember,” asked Aderhold, “that day when we chanced to meet in the forest and Master Harry Carthew came upon us?” “Aye,” said Joan, “I remember.” “Since then we have neither met nor spoken together until last week when your father was stricken and you watched for me coming from the village.—And now to-day I come only for this moment and will come no more.—Have you no close friends nor kindred?” “They are buried with father.... I mean to stay on here and spin flax and keep myself. And if—I mean to stay.” Her hand went out to touch the eglantine growing by the beehives. “I love it and I mean to stay.”