the pastime of life is the whole business
of it; sickness and death and misfortune,--to say nothing of cares
and duties--are the interruptions, to be got rid of as they may.

The next week came more letters; they had got a new idea out there.
Why should not Mrs. Ledwith and the others come and join them? They
were in Munich, now; the schools were splendid; would be just the
thing for Helena; and "it was time for mamma to have a rest."

This thought, among the dozen others, had had its turn in Mrs.
Ledwith's head. To break away, and leave everything, that is the
impulse of natures like hers when things go hard and they cannot
shape them. Only to get off; if she could do that!

Meanwhile, it was far different with Desire.

She was suffering with a deeper pain; not with a sharper loss, for
she had seen so little of her father; but she looked in and back,
and thought of what she _ought_ to miss, and what had never been.

She ought to have known her father better; his life ought to have
been more to her; was it her fault, or, harder yet, had it been his?
This is the sorest thrust of grief; when it is only shock, and pity,
and horror, and after these go by, not grief enough!

The child wrestled with herself, as she always did, questioning,
arraigning. If she could make it all right, in the past, and now; if
she could feel that all she had to do was to be tenderly sorry, and
to love on through the darkness, she would not mind the dark; it
would be only a phase of the life,--the love. But to have lived her
life so far, to have had the relations of it, and yet _not_ to have
lived it, not to have been real child, real sister, not to be real
stricken daughter now, tasting the suffering just as God made it to
be tasted,--was she going through all things, even this, in a vain
shadow? _Would_ not life touch her?

She went away back, strangely, and asked whether she had had any
business to be born? Whether it were a piece of God's truth at all,
that she and all of them should be, and call themselves a
household,--a home? The depth, the beauty of it were so unfulfilled!
What was wrong, and how far back? Living in the midst of
superficialities; in the noontide of a day of shams; putting her
hands forth and grasping, almost everywhere, nothing but thin, hard
surface,--she wondered how much of the world was real; how many came
into the world where, and as, God meant them to come. What it was to
"climb up some other way into the s