"I cannot help that, Elizabeth: the plum tree is not yours, it belongs to Stoke Revel."
"Then ma'am, you'll be 'lowing me something for it surely?"
"No," said Mrs. de Tracy obstinately, "you have no legal claim to compensation, Elizabeth. I cannot undertake to allow you anything for what is not yours. If I did it in your case you know quite well I should have to do it in many others."
There was a long and heavy silence. Elizabeth Prettyman was taking in her sentence of banishment from her old home; Mrs. de Tracy was merely wondering how long it would take her to walk down that nasty steep bit of path to the ferry. At last the old woman looked up.
"When must I be goin' then, ma'am?" she asked meekly.
Mrs. de Tracy considered. "The transfer of land from one person to another generally takes some time: you will have several weeks here still; I shall send you notice later which day to quit."
"Thank you, ma'am," said Elizabeth simply, and added, "The plum tree blossoms 'ul be over by that time."
"I don't see what that has to do with it," said Mrs. de Tracy, in whose heart there was room for no sentiment.
"'T would have been 'arder leavin' it in blossom time," the old woman explained; but her hearer could not see the point. She rose slowly from her chair and looked around the cottage.
"I am glad to see that you keep your place clean and respectable, Elizabeth," she said. "I wish you good afternoon."
Elizabeth never rose from her chair to see her visitor to the door--(an omission which Mrs. de Tracy was not likely to overlook)--she just sat there gazing stupidly around the tiny kitchen and muttering a word or two now and then. At last she got up and tottered to the garden.
"I'll 'ave to leave it all--leave the old bench as me William did put for me with his own 'ands, and leave Duckie, Duckie can't never go to Exeter if I goes there,--and leave the plum tree." She limped across the little bit of sunny turf, and stood under the white canopy of the blossoming tree, leaning against its slender trunk. "Pity 't is we ain't rooted in the ground same as the trees are," she mused. "Then no one couldn't turn us out; only the Lord Almighty cut us down when our time came; Lord knows I'm about ready for that now--grave-ripe as you may say." She leaned her poor weary old head against the tree stem and wept, ready, ah! how ready, at that moment, to lay down the burden of her long and toilsome life.