My uncle fell a-thinking again. He did not, however, answer this last question, for I suspect he found that it would not be good for me to know the real cause--namely, that people hardly believed it, and therefore did not say it. Most people believe far more in their bodies than in their souls. What my uncle did say was-- ‘I hardly know. But grannie’s gone to heaven anyhow.’ ‘I’m so glad!’ I said. ‘She will be more comfortable there. She was too old, you know, uncle.’ He made no reply. My aunt’s apron was covering her face, and when she took it away, I observed that those eager almost angry eyes were red with weeping. I began to feel a movement at my heart, the first fluttering physical sign of a waking love towards her. ‘Don’t cry, auntie,’ I said. ‘I don’t see anything to cry about. Grannie has got what she wanted.’ She made me no answer, and I sat down to my breakfast. I don’t know how it was, but I could not eat it. I rose and took my way to the hollow in the field. I felt a strange excitement, not sorrow. Grannie was actually dead at last. I did not quite know what it meant. I had never seen a dead body. Neither did I know that she had died while I slept with my hand in hers. Nannie, seeing something peculiar, had gone to her the moment I left the room, and had found her quite cold. Had we been a talking family, I might have been uneasy until I had told the story of my last interview with her; but I never thought of saying a word about it. I cannot help thinking now that I was waked up and sent to the old woman, my great-grandmother, in the middle of the night, to help her to die in comfort. Who knows? What we can neither prove nor comprehend forms, I suspect, the infinitely larger part of our being. When I was taken to see what remained of grannie, I experienced nothing of the dismay which some children feel at the sight of death. It was as if she had seen something just in time to leave the look of it behind her there, and so the final expression was a revelation. For a while there seems to remain this one link between some dead bodies and their living spirits. But my aunt, with a common superstition, would have me touch the face. That, I confess, made me shudder: the cold of death is so unlike any other cold! I seemed to feel it in my hand all the rest of the day.