I called before?'
he said, and he took no pains. He was angry because some one hadn't
explained. I begged him--but it was too late."

She said these things very quietly with drooping eyelids, like one
who describes a dream. "We are going to manage all these things
better now," I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitiful
little story her faded, matter-of-fact voice was telling me.

"She talked," my mother went on. "She talked for her age wonderfully.
. . . Hippopotamus."

"Eh?" I said.

"Hippopotamus, dear--quite plainly one day, when her father was
showing her pictures. . . And her little prayers. 'Now I lay me.
. . . down to sleep.' . . . I made her little socks. Knitted they
was, dear, and the heel most difficult."

Her eyes were closed now. She spoke no longer to me but to herself.
She whispered other vague things, little sentences, ghosts of long
dead moments. . . . Her words grew less distinct.

Presently she was asleep and I got up and went out of the room,
but my mind was queerly obsessed by the thought of that little life
that had been glad and hopeful only to pass so inexplicably out of
hope again into nonentity, this sister of whom I had never
heard before. . . .

And presently I was in a black rage at all the irrecoverable sorrows
of the past, of that great ocean of avoidable suffering of which
this was but one luminous and quivering red drop. I walked in the
garden and the garden was too small for me; I went out to wander
on the moors. "The past is past," I cried, and all the while across
the gulf of five and twenty years I could hear my poor mother's
heart-wrung weeping for that daughter baby who had suffered and
died. Indeed that old spirit of rebellion has not altogether died
in me, for all the transformation of the new time. . . . I quieted
down at last to a thin and austere comfort in thinking that the
whole is not told to us, that it cannot perhaps be told to such
minds as ours; and anyhow, and what was far more sustaining, that
now we have strength and courage and this new gift of wise love,
whatever cruel and sad things marred the past, none of these sorrowful
things that made the very warp and woof of the old life, need now
go on happening. We could foresee, we could prevent and save. "The
past is past," I said, between sighing and resolve, as I came into
view again on my homeward way of the hundred sunset-lit windows of
old Lowchester House. "Those sorrows are sorrows no more."