e
short grass, where the chalk broke through in patches. She could hear a
distant rumbling, very low, travelling in that grass, the long mutter
of the Flanders guns. 'I wonder if it's as beautiful a day there,' she
thought. 'How dreadful to see no green, no butterflies, no flowers-not
even sky-for the dust of the shells. Oh! won't it ever, ever end?' And
a sort of passion for the earth welled up in her, the warm grassy earth
along which she lay, pressed so close that she could feel it with every
inch of her body, and the soft spikes of the grass against her nose and
lips. An aching sweetness tortured her, she wanted the earth to close
its arms about her, she wanted the answer to her embrace of it. She was
alive, and wanted love. Not death--not loneliness--not death! And out
there, where the guns muttered, millions of men would be thinking that
same thought!

X

Pierson had passed nearly the whole night with the relics of his past,
the records of his stewardship, the tokens of his short married life.
The idea which had possessed him walking home in the moonlight sustained
him in that melancholy task of docketing and destruction. There was
not nearly so much to do as one would have supposed, for, with all
his dreaminess, he had been oddly neat and businesslike in all parish
matters. But a hundred times that night he stopped, overcome by
memories. Every corner, drawer, photograph, paper was a thread in the
long-spun web of his life in this house. Some phase of his work,
some vision of his wife or daughters started forth from each bit of
furniture, picture, doorway. Noiseless, in his slippers, he stole up and
down between the study, diningroom, drawing-room, and anyone seeing him
at his work in the dim light which visited the staircase from above the
front door and the upper-passage window, would have thought: 'A ghost, a
ghost gone into mourning for the condition of the world.' He had to make
this reckoning to-night, while the exaltation of his new idea was on
him; had to rummage out the very depths of old association, so that once
for all he might know whether he had strength to close the door on the
past. Five o'clock struck before he had finished, and, almost dropping
from fatigue, sat down at his little piano in bright daylight. The last
memory to beset him was the first of all; his honeymoon, before they
came back to live in this house, already chosen, furnished, and waiting
for them. They had spent it in Germ