very wisdom of his
rule,--what can you do? What is to be done? Individual benevolence at
haphazard may balk him here and there, but what have you to put in the
place of his well-considered scheme? Charity which makes paupers? or what
else? I had not considered the question deeply, but it seemed to me that
I now came to a blank wall, which my vague human sentiment of pity and
scorn could find no way to breach. There must be wrong somewhere, but
where? There must be some change for the better to be made, but how?

I was seated with a book before me on the table, with my head supported
on my hands. My eyes were on the printed page, but I was not reading; my
mind was full of these thoughts, my heart of great discouragement and
despondency,--a sense that I could do nothing, yet that there surely must
and ought, if I but knew it, be something to do. The fire which Morphew
had built up before dinner was dying out, the shaded lamp on my table
left all the corners in a mysterious twilight. The house was perfectly
still, no one moving: my father in the library, where, after the habit of
many solitary years, he liked to be left alone, and I here in my retreat,
preparing for the formation of similar habits. I thought all at once of
the third member of the party, the new-comer, alone too in the room that
had been hers; and there suddenly occurred to me a strong desire to take
up my lamp and go to the drawing-room and visit her, to see whether her
soft, angelic face would give any inspiration. I restrained, however,
this futile impulse,--for what could the picture say?--and instead
wondered what might have been had she lived, had she been there, warmly
enthroned beside the warm domestic centre, the hearth which would have
been a common sanctuary, the true home. In that case what might have
been? Alas! the question was no more simple to answer than the other: she
might have been there alone too, her husband's business, her son's
thoughts, as far from her as now, when her silent representative held her
old place in the silence and darkness. I had known it so, often enough.
Love itself does not always give comprehension and sympathy. It might be
that she was more to us there, in the sweet image of her undeveloped
beauty, than she might have been had she lived and grown to maturity and
fading, like the rest.

I cannot be certain whether my mind was still lingering on this not very
cheerful reflection, or if it had been left behind, when