Time hung heavily and more heavily with Joan at Drift. A fortnight passed;
but the hope of the ignorant and trustful dies very hard and the faith
which is bred of absolute love has a hundred lives. The girl walked into
Penzance every second day, and hope blazed brightly on the road to the
post-office, then sank a little deeper into the hidden places of her heart
as she plodded empty-handed back to Drift.
Slowly, and so gradually that she herself knew it not, her thoughts grew
something less occupied with John Barren, something more concerned about
herself. For the world was full of happy mothers now. One "Brindle"--a
knot-cow of repute--dropped a fine bull-calf in a croft hard by the
orchard, and Joan looked into "Brindle's" solemn eyes after the event, and
learned. She marveled to see the little brown calf stand on his shaking
legs within an hour of his birth; then his mother licked him lovingly,
while Uncle Chirgwin himself drew off her "buzzy milk." There was another
mother in a disused pigsty. There Joan found a red and white tortoise-shell
cat with four blind, squeaking atoms beside her, and as the cat rolled over
and the atoms sucked life, Joan saw her shining eyes, afore-time so bright
and hard, full of a new strange light, like the cloud that glimmers over
the fires of an opal. The cat's green orbs were full of mystery: of pain
past, of joy present. So again Joan learned.
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