e earl's
private secretary--as faithful and fond as a dog, and as safely
silent.

So wore the time away, as it wears on with all of us, through joy and
sorrow, absence or presence, with cheerful fullness or aching emptiness
of heart. It brought spring back, and summer--the sunshine to the
hills, and the leaves, and flowers, and birds to the woods; it brought
the earl's birthday--kept festively as ever by his people, who loved
him better every year; but it did not bring Helen home to Cairnforth.

Chapter 12

Life, when we calmly analyze it, is made up to us all alike of three
simple elements--joy, sorrow, and work. Some of us get tolerably
equal proportions of each of these; some unequal--or we fancy so; but
in reality, as the ancient sage says truly, "the same things come alike
to all."

The Earl of Cairnforth, in his imperfect fragment of a life, had had
little enough of enjoyment; but he knew how to endure better than most
people. He had, however, still to learn that existence is not wholly
endurance; that a complete human life must have in it not only
submission but resistance; the fighting against evil and in defense of
good; the struggle with divine help to overcome evil with good; and
finally the determination not to sit down tamely to misery but to strive
after happiness--lawful happiness, both for ourselves and others. In
short, not only passively to accept joy or grief, but to take means to
secure the one and escape the other; to "work out our own salvation" for
each day, as we are told to do it for an eternity, though with the same
divine limitation--humbling to all pride, and yet encouraging to
ceaseless effort--"for it is God that worketh in us both to will and
to do of His good pleasure."

That self-absorption of loss, which follows all great anguish; that
shrinking up unto one's self, which is the first and most natural
instinct of a creature smitten with a sorrow not unmingled with cruel
wrong, is, with most high natures, only temporary. By-and-by comes the
merciful touch which says to the lame, "Arise and walk;" to the sick,
"Take up thy bed and go into thine house." And the whisper of peace is,
almost invariably, a whisper of labor and effort: there is not only
something to be suffered, but something to be done.

With the earl this state was longer in coming, because the prior
collapse did not come to him at once. The excitement of perpetual
expectation--the preparing for some cat