he saw a glimpse of her husband's buff coat in the floods,
as the water rolled the body against the garden hedge. She
called to the men in the boat. She was glad he was found. They
dragged him out of the hedge. They could not lift him into the
boat. Fred Brangwen jumped into the water, up to his waist, and
half carried the body of his father through the flood to the
road. Hay and twigs and dirt were in the beard and hair. The
youth pushed through the water crying loudly without tears, like
a stricken animal. The mother at the window cried, making no
trouble.

The doctor came. But the body was dead. They carried it up to
Cossethay, to Anna's house.

When Anna Brangwen heard the news, she pressed back her head
and rolled her eyes, as if something were reaching forward to
bite at her throat. She pressed back her head, her mind was
driven back to sleep. Since she had married and become a mother,
the girl she had been was forgotten. Now, the shock threatened
to break in upon her and sweep away all her intervening life,
make her as a girl of eighteen again, loving her father. So she
pressed back, away from the shock, she clung to her present
life.

It was when they brought him to her house dead and in his wet
clothes, his wet, sodden clothes, fully dressed as he came from
market, yet all sodden and inert, that the shock really broke
into her, and she was terrified. A big, soaked, inert heap, he
was, who had been to her the image of power and strong life.

Almost in horror, she began to take the wet things from him,
to pull off him the incongruous market-clothes of a well-to-do
farmer. The children were sent away to the Vicarage, the dead
body lay on the parlour floor, Anna quickly began to undress
him, laid his fob and seals in a wet heap on the table. Her
husband and the woman helped her. They cleared and washed the
body, and laid it on the bed.

There, it looked still and grand. He was perfectly calm in
death, and, now he was laid in line, inviolable, unapproachable.
To Anna, he was the majesty of the inaccessible male, the
majesty of death. It made her still and awe-stricken, almost
glad.

Lydia Brangwen, the mother, also came and saw the impressive,
inviolable body of the dead man. She went pale, seeing death. He
was beyond change or knowledge, absolute, laid in line with the
infinite. What had she to do with him? He was a majestic
Abstraction, made visible now for a moment, inviolate, absolute.
And who could