n to drag. Albert had a
sort of vague looking for something, a superstitious feeling that by some
sort of a miracle Katy would yet be found alive. It is the hardest work
the imagination has to do--this realizing that one who has lived by us
will never more be with us. It is hard to project a future for
ourselves, into which one who has filled a large share of our thought and
affection shall never come. And so there lingers a blind hope, a hopeless
hope of something that shall make unreal that which our impotent
imaginations refuse to accept as real. It is a means by which nature
parries a sudden blow.

Charlton walked up and down the shore, and wished he might take the
drag-line into his own hands; but the mistaken kindness of our friends
refuses us permission to do for our own dead, when doing anything would
be a relief, and when doing for the dead would be the best possible
utterance to the hopeless love which we call grief.

Mrs. Plausaby, weak and vain though she was, was full of natural
affection. Her love for Albert was checked a little by her feeling that
there was no perfect sympathy between him and her. But upon Katy she had
lavished all her mother's love. People are apt to think that a love which
is not intelligent is not real; there could be no greater mistake. And
the very smallness of the area covered by Mrs. Plausaby's mind made her
grief for Kate all the more passionate. Katy occupied Albert's mind
jointly with Miss Minorkey, with ambition, with benevolence, with
science, with literature, and with the great Philanthropinum that was to
be built and to revolutionize the world by helping it on toward its
"goal." But the interests that shared Mrs. Plausaby's thoughts along with
Katy were very few. Of Albert she thought, and of her husband. But she
gave the chief place to Katy and her own appearance. And so when the blow
had come it was a severe one. At midnight, Albert went back to try to
comfort his mother, and received patiently all her weeping upbraidings
of him for letting his sister go in the boat, he might have known it was
not safe. And then he hastened back again to the water, and watched the
men in the boat still dragging without result. Everybody on the shore
knew just where the "Lady of the Lake" had capsized, and if accurate
information, plentifully given, could have helped to find the bodies, it
would soon have been accomplished. The only difficulty was that this
accurate information was very co