s she realised how, with more
than half of her life, at the best, behind her, she had up to this
moment been spending the rest of it still looking onward, still living
in the future. She had dreamt of the time when, helped by her, her
husband should go forward in his career, when, steered under her
guidance, Rachel would go along the smiling path to happiness. And now,
instead, she was to be to husband and daughter but the constant object
of care and solicitude and pity. Yes, pity--that was the worst of it.
"An invalid," she repeated to herself, and felt that at last she knew
what that word meant that she had heard all her life, that she had
applied unconcernedly to one fellow-creature or another without
realising all that it means of tragedy, of startled, growing dread,
followed by hopeless and despairing acceptance. Then there came a day
when, calling all her courage to her help, she made up her mind bravely
to begin life afresh, to sketch her destiny from another point of view,
and yet to make a success of the picture. The battle had to be fought
out alone. Sir William, after the agony of thinking he was going to lose
her, after the rapture of joy at knowing that the parting was not to be
yet, had insensibly become accustomed, as one does become accustomed to
the trials of another, to the altered conditions of their lives, and it
was even unconsciously a sort of agreeable certainty that whatever the
weather, whatever the claims of the day, she would every afternoon be
found in the same place, never away, never occupied about the house,
always ready to listen, to sympathise. She had made up her mind that
since now she was debarred from active participation in the lives of her
husband and daughter, she would by unceasing, strenuous daily effort
keep abreast of their daily interests, and be by her sympathy as much a
part of their existence as though she had been, as before, their
constant companion.

The smallness of such a family circle may act in two ways: it may either
send the members of it in different directions, or it may draw them
together in an intense concentration of interests and sympathy. This
latter was happily the condition of the Gores. The varying degrees of
their strength and weaknesses had been so mercifully adjusted by destiny
that each could find in the other some support--whether real or fancied
does not matter. For illusions, if they last, form as good a working
basis for life as reality, and in t