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She threw away the root she had munched, and chose two others. She could not take more, because she must be prepared to hide her booty, which she had decided to do by slipping it into the front of her gown, where it would merely seem to supply those natural deficiencies of which she was already aware. As she ran back home she felt proudly that she had the shape of a grown woman to add to the triumphs of the day.

She ran quickly, close under the hedge, for all the world was awake now. When she reached the Boot, the door stood open, and her mother sat in her rocking-chair against the wall, her chin drooping, her body sagging, her arms dangling loose from her shoulders.

"Susan—Susan—where have you been all this gurt while?"

"Mam, I saw the Burning Bush."

Ruth's lips stretched pallidly in a sad, indifferent smile. "You needn't trouble to tell those tales to me. Tell 'um to the Brethren."

Susan laid the two big roots in her lap, and her mother burst into tears.

§ 12

That night she dreamed of Ezekiel's temple. It was but seemly that the return of her vision should complete that wonderful day. The Burning Bush and turnip soup. . . . At dawn, the Lord Almighty gazing at her with His floating fiery eye through the laced twigs of a thorn, at dusk the smell of cooking soup coming to meet her as she ran home. She would never forget how deliciously that smell had crept towards her through the other smells of evening, the low drift of wood-smoke and the settling fogs. Inside the Boot, a rushlight was burning, and her mother's great shadow heeled over the ceiling as she set down the soup on the table, so that it was as if some shadowy being from another world, an angel or a ghost, stooped from above to feed the hungry Sprays.