A Small Country by Sian James Page B

holidays. She told everyone she was leaving because she had to return to her family. Many, though, while pretending to believe her, formed other conjectures which were nearer the truth.
    The deputy director of education came to the school a week before she left at the end of February, and after thanking her for her years of loyal service, looked her full in the face and asked her whether there was a chance of her getting married. ‘There’s no chance of it,’ she said.
    He shook hands with her sadly.
    ‘You’ll all remember Miss Lewis,’ he told the children. ‘No need for me to say anything. You’ll all remember her. For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful, isn’t it.’
    She had asked that there should be no farewell party. Two heavy brass candlesticks were presented to her, though, on the last day; a former pupil had made a door-to-door collection and found a ready response. The children brought her snowdrops and catkins and birds’ eggs. By the end of the day, most of the girls were in tears; one of the big boys cried too, though he said it was because a piece of chalk had got stuck in his nose.

    She moved to Llanfryn where her aunt, her father’s only surviving sister, lived in a small terraced house. After three or four months of sickness and anxiety it seemed the only place she could go to, she hadn’t the energy or the spirit to make any other arrangements.
    Hetty Lewis, who had nursed her willingly and cheerfully enough through the attack of measles six years earlier, was almost eighty by this time and didn’t take kindly to the irregularity of the situation. ‘It isn’t right for you to go to strangers, I suppose,’ she’d said. ‘All the same, I can’t say that you’re welcome. No, I don’t like it a bit, not a bit.’
    Though she had not been capable of turning her niece away, she often refused to talk to her for days at a time. She wouldn’t let her go out except late at night, and made her rush upstairs if anyone came to call. ‘This is a respectable house, this is,’ she would say, if Miriam dared to grumble at the way she was treated.
    And when Josi came to her door, bold as brass and determined to see Miriam, it seemed the last straw. ‘This isn’t right, Mr Evans, no indeed. What will my neighbours think.’ He had almost to force his way into the house. She wouldn’t allow him to be on his own with Miriam however much he would argue that it was bolting the stable door too late. ‘This is my house, this is, and I won’t have any goings-on. There’s been too many goings-on between you and my niece if you ask me, and a pretty pass it’s brought her to and what can you do about it? Nothing.’
    She never believed that Josi intended to leave Hendre Ddu when his son returned from Oxford for the summer, indeed would have thought no more of him if she had, marriage being sacrosanct in her eyes.
    Every Sunday, morning and evening, after she had been to chapel she would insist on going over the sermon so that Miriam should not be entirely cut off from the chance of salvation. She would often stray from the kindly precepts of her present minister to the sterner teachings of her earliest mentors, their insistence on the flaming tortures of hell. And finally, realizing that Miriam didn’t show the right degree of concern about the wailing and gnashing of teeth, almost every sermon she relayed would contain reference to David’s adulterous love for Bathsheba and God’s punishment in the death of their son.
    This always roused Miriam. Hadn’t Christ come to teach a different morality? she would ask. Hadn’t he said that hypocrisy was the worst sin? Hadn’t he forgiven the prostitute and the woman taken in adultery?
    At which Hetty, bewildered and angry at Miriam’s daring to cross such thorny ground, would point to her and shout, ‘Go thou and sin no more.’ And Miriam, in spite of her fury would be left shaken and close to tears. It was a miserable