If I die," he whispered in the dark, "dinna follow me. The bairns will need ye. Stay for them. I can wait.

It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.

Men go where they will, they do as they must; it is not a woman's part to bid them to stay, nor yet to reproach them for being what they are-or for not coming back.

I will find you," he whispered in my ear. "I promise. If I must endure two hundred years of purgatory, two hundred years without you - then that is my punishment, which I have earned for my crimes. For I have lied, and killed, and stolen; betrayed and broken trust. But there is the one thing that shall lie in the balance. When I shall stand before God, I shall have one thing to say, to weigh against the rest." His voice dropped, nearly to a whisper, and his arms tightened around me. Lord, ye gave me a rare woman, and God! I loved her well.

With that height, plus a face of an ugliness so transcendant as to be grotesquely beautiful, it was obvious why she had embraced a religious life--Christ was the only man from whom she might expect embrace in return.

...well, if women's work was never done, why trouble about how much of it wasn't being accomplished at any given moment?

The past is gone-the future is not come. And we are here together, you and I.