there and had not come up and done it round her.
She disliked jokes at all times, but in the morning she hated them;
especially close up; especially crowding in her ears. She hoped the
originals were on their way out for a walk, and not on their way back
from one. They were laughing more and more. What could they possibly
find to laugh at?

She looked down on the tops of their heads with a very serious
face, for the thought of spending a month with laughers was a grave
one, and they, as though they felt her eyes, turned suddenly and looked
up.

The dreadful geniality of those women. . .

She shrank away from their smiles and wavings, but she could not
shrink out of sight without falling into the lilies. She neither
smiled nor waved back, and turning her eyes to the more distant
mountains surveyed them carefully till the two, tired of waving, moved
away along the path and turned the corner and disappeared.

This time they both did notice that they had been met with, at
least, unresponsiveness.

"If we weren't in heaven," said Mrs. Wilkins serenely, "I should
say we had been snubbed, but as nobody snubs anybody there of course we
can't have been."

"Perhaps she is unhappy," said Mrs. Arbuthnot.

"Whatever it is she is she'll get over it here," said Mrs.
Wilkins with conviction.

"We must try and help her," said Mrs. Arbuthnot.

"Oh, but nobody helps anybody in heaven. That's finished with.
You don't try to be, or do. You simply are."

Well, Mrs. Arbuthnot wouldn't go into that--not here, not to-day.
The vicar, she knew, would have called Lotty's talk levity, if not
profanity. How old he seemed from here; an old, old vicar.

They left the path, and clambered down the olive terraces, down
and down, to where at the bottom the warm, sleepy sea heaved gently
among the rocks. There a pine-tree grew close to the water, and they
sat under it, and a few yards away was a fishing-boat lying motionless
and green-bellied on the water. The ripples of the sea made little
gurgling noises at their feet. They screwed up their eyes to be able
to look into the blaze of light beyond the shade of their tree. The
hot smell from the pine-needles and from the cushions of wild thyme
that padded the spaces between the rocks, and sometimes a smell of pure
honey from a clump of warm irises up behind them in the sun, puffed
across their faces. Very soon Mrs. Wilkins took her shoes and stockings
off, and let her feet hang in