herself.

She had been very sleepless that night, she said, and took the
reports of the falling stars for shooting; there had been rioting
in Clayton and all through Swathinglea all day, and so she got out
of bed to look. She had a dim sense that I was in all such troubles.

But she was not looking when the Change came.

"When I saw the stars a-raining down, dear," she said, "and thought
of you out in it, I thought there'd be no harm in saying a prayer
for you, dear? I thought you wouldn't mind that."

And so I got another of my pictures--the green vapors come and go,
and there by her patched coverlet that dear old woman kneels and
droops, still clasping her poor gnarled hands in the attitude of
prayer--prayer to IT--for me!

Through the meagre curtains and blinds of the flawed refracting
window I see the stars above the chimneys fade, the pale light of
dawn creeps into the sky, and her candle flares and dies. . . .

That also went with me through the stillness--that silent
kneeling figure, that frozen prayer to God to shield me, silent
in a silent world, rushing through the emptiness of space. . . .

Section 6

With the dawn that awakening went about the earth. I have told how
it came to me, and how I walked in wonder through the transfigured
cornfields of Shaphambury. It came to every one. Near me, and for
the time, clear forgotten by me, Verrall and Nettie woke--woke near
one another, each heard before all other sounds the other's voice
amidst the stillness, and the light. And the scattered people who
had run to and fro, and fallen on the beach of Bungalow village,
awoke; the sleeping villagers of Menton started, and sat up in
that unwonted freshness and newness; the contorted figures in the
garden, with the hymn still upon their lips, stirred amidst the
flowers, and touched each other timidly, and thought of Paradise.
My mother found herself crouched against the bed, and rose--rose
with a glad invincible conviction of accepted prayer. . . .

Already, when it came to us, the soldiers, crowded between the
lines of dusty poplars along the road to Allarmont, were chatting
and sharing coffee with the French riflemen, who had hailed them
from their carefully hidden pits among the vineyards up the slopes
of Beauville. A certain perplexity had come to these marksmen, who
had dropped asleep tensely ready for the rocket that should wake
the whirr and rattle of their magazines. At the sight and sound of
the st