d Maud exactly how matters stand, and she acquiesces, though I
can see that, just at this time, the thought of handing over to
strangers the house where we have lived all our married life, the rooms
where Alec and the baby died, is a deep grief to her. To me that is
almost a relief. I have dreaded going back there. To-night I told
Maggie, and she broke out into long weeping. But even so there is
something about the idea of being poor, strange to say, which touches a
sense of romance in the child. She does not realise the poky
restrictions of the new life.

And still stranger to me is the way in which this solid, tangible
trouble seems to have restored my energy and calm. I found myself
clear-headed, able to grasp the business questions which arose, gifted
with a hard lucidity of mind that I did not know I possessed. It is a
relief to get one's teeth into something, to have hard, definite
occupation to distract one; indeed, it hardly seems to me in the light
of a misfortune at present, so much as a blessed tangible problem to be
grappled with and solved. What I should have felt if all had been lost,
and if I had had to resign my liberty, and take up some practical
occupation, I hardly know. I do not think I should even have dreaded
that in my present frame of mind.

September 15, 1889.

I have been thinking all day long of my last walk with Alec, the day
before he was taken ill. Maud had gone out with Maggie; and the little
sturdy figure came to my room to ask if I was going out. I was
finishing a book that I was reading for the evening's work; I had been
out in the morning, and I had not intended to go out again, as it was
cold and drizzling. I very nearly said that I could not go, and I had a
shadow of vexation at being interrupted. But I looked up at him, as he
stood by the door, and there was a tiny shadow of loneliness upon his
face; and I thank God now that I put my book down at once, and
consented cheerfully. He brightened up at this; he fetched my cap and
stick, and we went off together. I am glad to think that I had him to
myself that day. He was in a more confidential mood than usual.
Perhaps--who knows?--there was some shadow of death upon him, some
instinct to clasp hands closer before the end. He asked me to tell him
some stories of my schooldays, and what I used to do as a boy--but he
was full of alertness and life, breaking into my narratives to point
out a nest that we had seen in the spring, and t