In the fresh morning there was more or less meeting and passing on the road. A shepherd with a flock of sheep overtook her, and she stood under an elm to let them by. The shepherd whistled clearly, the sheep kept up their plaintive crying, pushing and jostling with their woolly bodies, their feet making a small pattering sound. “To market! To market!” said the shepherd. “Are you for the market, too, pretty maid?” Farther on she overtook in her turn two or three children going on some errand and walked with them awhile. They wanted to know what was in her basket and she opened the jar and showed them the bright honeycomb, then, breaking clean skewers from a wayside hazel, dipped them in the liquid gold and gave each child a taste. They left her at a lane mouth, and she walked for a little way with two women who were carrying between them an old tavern sign painted with a sheaf of wheat and a giant bunch of grapes. When she had left these two behind and had gone some distance upon a bare, sunny road, she saw before her like a picture the river and the bridge, the climbing town and the castle. She could make out the Black Tower among the trees. The town was quit of the plague. To the knowing there would be still visible a gloom about the place, a trailing shadow of remembered fear and loss. People would be missed from the streets, vacant houses and shops remarked. Street cries and sounds would come more sombrely and the sunshine fall less warmly. But to the stranger it would seem a town as usual. For Joan, it was not so gay and rich as once it had been, because she that looked on it was not so care-free as once she had been. But still it was to her the great town, so different from Hawthorn, so jewelled with pleasant memories.... She passed the vintner’s house and was glad to see that it was open and cheerful, and that therefore he had not died of the plague. At length she came to climb the castle hill, and with her heart beating fast to cross the pleasaunce and go around to a certain small door of the offices through which she would soonest gain admittance to Mistress Borrow. The sky was so blue, the grass, the flowers, the budding trees were so fair, mavis and lark and robin sang so shrill and sweet, that earth and heaven once more assumed for Joan a mother aspect. Warm, not unhappy, tears came to her eyes. She shook them back and went on over daisies and violets. She had not slept last night and the miles were long between her and Heron’s cottage. She felt light-headed with the assurance of comfort and counsel, the sense that the black cloud that had gathered about her so strangely, so almost she knew not how, would now begin to melt away.