I was his wife, my dear.'

She the wife of a young man of three-and-twenty! Ah, true! It was
fifty-five years ago.

'You wonder to hear me say that,' remarked the old woman, shaking her
head. 'You're not the first. Older folk than you have wondered at the
same thing before now. Yes, I was his wife. Death doesn't change us
more than life, my dear.'

'Do you come here often?' asked the child.

'I sit here very often in the summer time,' she answered, 'I used to
come here once to cry and mourn, but that was a weary while ago, bless
God!'

'I pluck the daisies as they grow, and take them home,' said the old
woman after a short silence. 'I like no flowers so well as these, and
haven't for five-and-fifty years. It's a long time, and I'm getting
very old.'

Then growing garrulous upon a theme which was new to one listener
though it were but a child, she told her how she had wept and moaned
and prayed to die herself, when this happened; and how when she first
came to that place, a young creature strong in love and grief, she had
hoped that her heart was breaking as it seemed to be. But that time
passed by, and although she continued to be sad when she came there,
still she could bear to come, and so went on until it was pain no
longer, but a solemn pleasure, and a duty she had learned to like. And
now that five-and-fifty years were gone, she spoke of the dead man as
if he had been her son or grandson, with a kind of pity for his youth,
growing out of her own old age, and an exalting of his strength and
manly beauty as compared with her own weakness and decay; and yet she
spoke about him as her husband too, and thinking of herself in
connexion with him, as she used to be and not as she was now, talked of
their meeting in another world, as if he were dead but yesterday, and
she, separated from her former self, were thinking of the happiness of
that comely girl who seemed to have died with him.

The child left her gathering the flowers that grew upon the grave, and
thoughtfully retraced her steps.

The old man was by this time up and dressed. Mr Codlin, still doomed
to contemplate the harsh realities of existence, was packing among his
linen the candle-ends which had been saved from the previous night's
performance; while his companion received the compliments of all the
loungers in the stable-yard, who, unable to separate him from the
master-mind of Punch, set him down as next in importance to that merry
out