Lisbeth had even mended a long-neglected
and unnoticeable rent in the checkered bit of bed-curtain; for the
moments were few and precious now in which she would be able to do the
smallest office of respect or love for the still corpse, to which in all
her thoughts she attributed some consciousness. Our dead are never dead
to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can
be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their
place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their
presence. And the aged peasant woman most of all believes that her dead
are conscious. Decent burial was what Lisbeth had been thinking of for
herself through years of thrift, with an indistinct expectation that she
should know when she was being carried to the churchyard, followed by
her husband and her sons; and now she felt as if the greatest work of
her life were to be done in seeing that Thias was buried decently before
her--under the white thorn, where once, in a dream, she had thought she
lay in the coffin, yet all the while saw the sunshine above and smelt
the white blossoms that were so thick upon the thorn the Sunday she went
to be churched after Adam was born.
But now she had done everything that could be done to-day in the chamber
of death--had done it all herself, with some aid from her sons in
lifting, for she would let no one be fetched to help her from the
village, not being fond of female neighbours generally; and her
favourite Dolly, the old housekeeper at Mr.
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