been
their very life. Then out of that quiet hallowed darkness they came one
dreadful day into the brilliant sunlight, a day that was lived through
with the acutest pain of all, of which every detail seemed to have been
arranged by a horrible cruel convention of custom in order to intensify
the pangs of it. They drove at a foot's pace through the crowded, sunlit
streets, with a shrinking agony of self-consciousness as one and another
passer-by looked up for a moment at what was passing. "Look, Jim, 'ere's
a funeral!" one small boy called to another--and Rachel, shuddering,
buried her face in her hands and could have cried out aloud. Some men,
not all, lifted their hats; two gaily-dressed women who were just going
to cross stopped as a matter of course on the pavement and waited
indifferently, hardly seeing what it was, until the obstruction had gone
by, as they would have done had it been anything else. Rachel, leaning
back by her father, trying to hide herself, yet felt as if she could
not help seeing everything they met. Every step of the way was a slow
torture. And oh, the return home! that drive, at a brisk trot this time,
through the same crowded, unfeeling streets, which still retained the
association of the former progress through them, the sense that now, as
the coachman whipped up his horses, for every one save for the two
desolate people who sat silently together inside the carriage, life
might--indeed, would--throw off that aspect of gloom and go on as
before! And then the worst moment of all, the finding on their return
that the house had taken on a ghastly semblance of its usual aspect,
that the blinds were up, the windows open, the sun streaming in
everywhere--the hard, cruel light, as it seemed to Rachel, shining into
the rooms that were for evermore to be different.

Then followed the time which is incomparably the worst after a great
loss, the time when, ordinary life being taken up again, the sufferer
has the additional trial of too large an amount of leisure on his
hands--the horror of all those new spare hours that used to be passed in
a companionship that is gone, that must be filled up with something
fresh unless they are to stand in wide, horrible emptiness, to assail
recollection with unendurable grief. And especially in that house were
they empty, where the existence of both father and daughter had revolved
round that of another to a greater extent than that of most people. The
problem of how to