, I used to wake up to the
fact, day after day, with a trembling dismay. Now it is not like that.
I can give no account of what I do. The smallest things about me seem
to take up my mind. I can sit for an hour by the hearth, neither
reading nor thinking, just watching the flame flicker over the coals,
or the red heart of the fire eating its way upwards and outwards. I can
sit on a sunshiny morning in the garden, merely watching with a strange
intentness what goes on about me, the uncrumpling leaf, the snowdrop
pushing from the mould, the thrush searching the lawn, the robin
slipping from bough to bough, the shapes of the clouds, the dying ray.
I seem to have no motive either to live or to die. I retrace in memory
my walks with Maggie, I can see her floating hair, and how she leaned
to me; I can sit, as I used to sit reading by Maud's side, and see her
face changing as the book's mood changed, her clear eye, her strong
delicate hands. I seem as if I had awaked from a long and beautiful
dream. People sometimes come and see me, and I can see the pity in
their faces and voices; I can see it in the anxious care with which my
good servants surround me; but I feel that it is half disingenuous in
me to accept it, because I need no pity. Perhaps there is something
left for me to do in the world: there seems no reason otherwise why I
should linger here.

Mr. ---- has been very good to me; I have seen him almost daily. He
seems the only person who perfectly understands. He has hardly said a
word to me about my sorrow. He said once that he should not speak of
it; before, he said, I was like a boy learning a lesson with the help
of another boy, but that now I was being taught by the Master Himself.
That may be so; but the Master has a very scared and dull pupil, alas,
who cannot even discern the letters. I care nothing whether God be
pleased or displeased; I bear His will, without either pain or
resistance. I simply feel as if there had been some vast and
overwhelming mistake somewhere; a mistake so incredible and
inconceivable that nothing else mattered; as if--I do not speak
profanely--God Himself were appalled at what He had done, and dared not
smite further one whom He had stunned into silence and apathy.

With Mr. ---- I talk; he talks of simple, quiet things, of old books
and thoughts. He tells me, sometimes, when I am too weary to speak,
long, beautiful, quiet stories of his younger days, and I listen like a
child to his gr