of tranquil
peace? Were they adjusting themselves with a sense of timid
impotence--those slender, tired spirits--to new and bewildering
conditions?

The old, dull house called to me that day with a hundred faint voices
and tremulous echoes. I could make nothing of it; for though it swept
the strings of my heart with a ghostly music, it seemed to have no
certain message for me, but the message of oblivion and silence.

I was sorry, as I went away, to leave the poor maidservant to her
lonely and desolate memories. She had to leave her comfortable kitchen
and her easy routine, for new duties and new faces, and I could see
that she anticipated the change with sad dismay.

It seemed to me in that hour as though the cruelty and the tenderness
of the world were very mysteriously blended--there was no lack of
tenderness in the old house with its innumerable small associations,
its sheltered calm. And then suddenly the stroke must fall, and fall
upon lives whose very security and gentleness seemed to have been so
ill a preparation for sterner and darker things. It would have been
more loving, one thought, either to have made the whole fabric more
austere, more precarious from the first; or else to have bestowed a
deep courage and a fertile hope, a firmer endurance, rather than to
have confronted lives so frail and delicate with the terrors of the
vast unknown.

April 8, 1890.

Our new house is charming, beautiful, homelike. It is an old stone
building, formerly a farm; it has a quaint garden and orchard, and the
wooded hill runs up steeply behind, with a stream in front. It is on
the outskirts of a village, and we are within three miles of Maud's old
home, so that she knows all the country round. We have got two of our
old servants, and a solid comfortable gardener, a native of the place.
The house within is quaint and comfortable. We have a spare bedroom; I
have no study, but shall use the little panelled dining-room. We have
had much to do in settling in, and I have done a great deal of hard
physical work myself, in the way of moving furniture and hanging
pictures, inducing much wholesome fatigue. Maggie, who broke down
dreadfully on leaving the old home, with the wonderful spring that
children have, is full of excitement and even delight in the new house.
I rather dread the time when all our occupations shall be over, and
when we shall settle down to the routine of life. I begin to wonder how
I shall occupy myself.