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reckonin’ o’ time.’
    She laughed at his shocked, pained face.
    ‘Will ye chide me for a shameless, brazen woman?’
    And he would answer her, solemn as a judge: ‘Why, Janie, how you do run on.’
    The two children gazed at their mother; Samuel holding on to his father’s hand, and the baby Mary safe in his arm, the pair were the picture of each other and Thomas all over again. Janet smiled to see them so, the three of them belonging to her, and part of her too, maybe; but the rest of her stole from the warm, cheerful room, and the dear kindly faces, and fled away, away, she knew not whither, beyond the quiet hills and the happy harbour of Plyn, through the seas and the sky - away to the untrodden air, and the nameless stars.

5
     
     
    N ext Christmas snow fell on Plyn. It lay light upon the hills and the fields, like the touch of a white hand protecting the earth. Even in Polmear Valley the stream was frozen, and the dark trees looked scarred and bleak against the sky.Then the sun shone from the blue heaven where there was never a cloud, and the hard frosts went with the melting snow, leaving but a thin pale covering in their place.
    Thomas went up to Truan woods and brought down with him great bunches of holly with flaming berries. With them he mingled pieces of ivy that could be spared from the house, and together he and Janet placed bits here and there about the rooms, and Thomas cleverly fashioned a bent branch of holly into a rough cross, and hung it above the porch.
    Janet busied herself in the kitchen, baking in preparation for the day of general rejoicing; there was to be company in the afternoon for tea, and she knew they would make short shrift of her cakes and puddings and pasties, and maybe expect a cup of hot broth too before they took their leave and went into the chill night.
    Thomas sat by the fire with his Bible on his knee, and the two children clung to Janet’s skirts the while, pleading for a taste of that which smelt so good in the pan on the hob.
    ‘Now leave your mother alone, there’s good children, do, or it’s never a taste of the puddin’ you’ll get till Christmas Day is come an’ gone,’ she scolded, and their father couldn’t but help to show his powers of authority, and called sharply to Samuel, ‘Now, let your mother be, Sammie, and you and your sister give over plaguin’. Come here to your father, and listen while I reads the good book to ye.’
    They obeyed silently, the boy dragging his little sister along the floor, she scarce able to walk. Thomas read aloud in his careful voice the first chapters of St Matthew, but it was not likely that two babies of their age could know what he was about, and they sat at his feet quietly enough playing with a rag doll that was shared by the pair of them.
    Janet straightened her back and rested awhile, her hand on her hip. After she had tidied up and laid the supper, and the children put to bed, it would soon be time for finding her bonnet and shawl, and while a kindly neighbour sat in the house to mind things, she and Thomas would set out side by side across the frosty hill to Lanoc Church for the midnight service.
    Somehow she had no wish to go tonight. She did not care to listen to the parson’s words, nor to join in singing the hymns with the others, nor even kneel by the altar rail to receive the Blessed Sacrament. She had a mind to slip away in the darkness, and run for the cliff path that overlooked the sea. There’d be a moon over the water, like a path of silver leading away from the black sea to the sky, and she’d be nearer to peace there than on her knees in Lanoc Church. Nearer to something for which there was no name, escaping from the world and losing herself, mingling with things that have no reckoning of time, where there is no today and no tomorrow.
    She was thinking, ‘’Tesn’t a churchy worshipful feeling in me tonight, ‘tes a wish to be alone with the moonlight on my face.’
    Then she took herself away