there came the consciousness that her
mother was not there, that she could not tell her, that she had
gone--gone without understanding, gone bewildered, broken. Her eyes
dimmed until the town was a blur. She wanted to see her mother!

She was about to start back, but turned for a moment's look the other
way, across that lovely country of little hills and valleys--brooks, and
cattle in the brooks, and fields of many shades of green.

And then her eye fixed upon one thing and after that saw no other thing.
Behind her was the place where the living were gathered together; but
over there, right over there on the next hill, were the dead. She stood
very still, looking over there passionately through dimmed eyes. And
then swiftly, sobbing a little under her breath, she started that way.
She wanted to see her mother!

And when she came within those gates she grew strangely quiet. Back
there in the dwelling place of the living she had felt shut out. But she
did not feel shut out here. As slowly she wound her way to the hillside
where she knew she would find her mother's grave, a strange peace
touched her. It was as if she had come within death's tolerance; she
seemed somehow to be taken into death's wonderful, all-inclusive love
for life. There seemed only one distinction: they were dead and she
still lived; she had a sense of being loved because she still lived.

Slowly, strangely comforted, strangely taken in, she passed the graves
of many who, when she left, had been back there in the place of the
living. The change from dwelling place to dwelling place had been made
in the years she was away. It came with a shock to find some of those
tombstones; she found many she had thought of as back there, a few hills
away, where men still lived. She would pause and think of them, of the
strangeness of finding them here when she had known them there--of
life's onward movement, of death's inevitability. There were stones
marking the burial places of friends of her grandfather--old people who
used to come to the house when she was a little girl; she thought with a
tender pleasure of little services she had done them; she had no feeling
at all that they would not want her to be there. Friends of her father
and mother too were there; yes, and some of her own friends--boys and
girls with whom she had shared youth.

She sat a long time on the hillside where her mother had been put away.
At first she cried, but they were not bitter tears