me home because here
she was loved, here, at least, through all the village--the village
about which she trod like one of God's kind angels--I shall be certain
of meeting a keen and assured sympathy in my sorrow.

"... Where indeed
The roof so lowly but that beam of heaven
Dawned some time through the door-way?"

And yet, now that I am here, the village seems much as it was. Still the
same groups of fat, frolicking children about the doors; still the same
busy women at the wash-tub; about the house still the same coarse
laughs.

It would be most unnatural, impossible that it should not be so, and yet
I feel angry--sorely angry with them.

One day when this sense of rawness is at its worst and sharpest, I
resolve that I will pay a visit to the almshouse. There, at least, I
shall find that she is remembered; there, out of mere selfishness, they
must grieve for her. When will they, in their unlovely eld, ever find
such a friend again?

So I go there. I find the old women, some crooning over the fire, half
asleep, some squabbling. I suppose they are glad to see me, though not
_so_ glad when they discover that I have brought no gift in my hand, for
indeed I have forgotten--no quarter-pounds of tea--no little
three-cornered parcels of sugar.

They begin to talk about Barbara at once. Among the poor there is never
any sacredness about the names of the dead, and though I have hungered
for sorrowful talk about her, for assurance that by some one besides
myself the awful emptiness of her place is felt, yet I wince and shrink
from hearing her lightly named in common speech.

They are sorry about her, certainly--quite sorry--but it is more what
they have lost by her, than her that they deplore. And they are more
taken up with their own little miserable squabbles--with detracting
tales of one another--than with either.

"Eh? she's a bad 'un, she is! I says to her, says I, 'Sally,' says I,
'if you'll give yourself hully and whully to the Lord for one week, I'll
give you a _hounce_ of baccy,' and she's that wicked, she actilly would
not."

Is _this_ the sort of thing I have come to hear? I rise up hastily, and
take my leave.

As I walk home again through the wintry roads, and my eyes fix
themselves with a tired languor on the green ivy-flowers--on the little
gray-green lichen-cups on the almshouse-wall, I think, "Does _no one_
remember her? Is she already altogether forgotten?"

It is still early in the aft