It was the first day of spring, the season of swift changes. For the
first time the sky was lighter than the ground. Its brilliant clouds
threw heavy shadows on the earth, fugitive shadows which ran with the
warm wind, alert with colour. Nothing was quiet or hidden. There was not
yet sufficient life to cover or screen. Everything that had budded had a
world to itself and could be seen. Radiant, innocent, carolling,
self-revealing, the movement and action of spring were in the earth. The
running and glittering water, in winter so vivid a feature of the
fields, had become insignificant in comparison with the splendid and
vigorous sky. The noise of the wind, too, beat in one's ears louder than
the water. One had no time for meditation. One was hurried as the wind,
speeding as the sunshine. Yet the spring more than any other season is
the time when one thinks of the generations that pass--perhaps from the
very transitoriness of the visual images, their evanescence and
momentary changes reminding one so of the dead. In autumn the passage is
grave and decorous, like the advance of old age. In spring the image is
lovely and momentary, like the bright passage of those dead young.

Anne Hilton looked out to see what kind of weather it was for the
market, and with a sudden pang, she remembered her old father, and how,
on such a day, he would totter to the open door, and there sit in the
sunshine, grateful for the same warmth for which his old dog was
grateful. When she came home from the market, she would make a wreath of
white holly to put on the grave in which he rested. She thought of him
vividly, of the pathos of his last illness from which she had vainly
tried to drive the fear and soften the pain. She remembered his slow
laugh, and the knocking of his stick on the floor. Memory is keener in
bright sunshine than in the twilight, in vivid enjoyment more poignant
than in melancholy. The churchyard, with its unvisited green mound and
dwelling of the silent, became visible to Anne, and with it the dying