Madonna-style cartoon figure with rose flash

"She isn't," I said. "She's wearing Hild's."

The commission had come from the widow Crake, who wanted a new panel for the chapel at Scarth before her husband's year's mind. I had painted the halo in the old manner, with rays like the bristles of a brush, and set a great red rose at the foot of the robe, because the chapel was dedicated to nothing grander than the wild rose hedge that grew over its gate. For the face I had sat Hild Mowbray, the schoolmistress, who taught the village letters and kept her nose in a psalter through round wire spectacles that caught the candlelight. She had not asked to be the Mother of God. I had simply found that the expression I wanted, patient and faintly amused, was hers.

Oswin read the scroll at the base, where Brother Piers, who had the wit of a goose and the hand of a saint, had lettered a joke in plain capitals while I was at supper. He read it twice. His mouth twitched at one corner, which I had never once seen it do in eleven years.

"Scrape the glasses off," he said. "Then scrape the lettering off."

I did neither. On Sunday the widow came up the lane to see her husband's memorial, stood before the panel for a long while with her hands folded, and then said, loudly enough for the whole nave, "That's Hild Mowbray. She'll never let me hear the end of it." Hild, at the back, pushed her spectacles up her nose and smiled as if she had known all along.