t night he
repeated her name many, many times, and sometimes added that she was his
favourite child, the only one who in character and mind resembled her
mother.

She was a quaint, methodical little creature. She had kept an
account-book, and he had found it, with all its pretty, and now most
pathetic little entries. He had put it in his breast-pocket, and his
hand sought it every few minutes as he sat in the long dusk of the
midsummer night. This was the first gap in his healthy, beautiful
family. He felt it keenly, but a man who has six children left does not
break his heart when he has to give one of them back to God.

No; but he was aware that his heart was breaking, and that now and then
there came intervals in his sleepless nights and days when he did not
feel at all or think at all. Sometimes for a few minutes he could not
see. After these intervals of dull, amazed quiescence, when he was
stupid and cold even to the heart, there were terrible times when he
seemed to rouse himself to almost preternatural consciousness of the
things about him, when the despair of the situation roused up like a
tiger, and took hold of him and shook him body and mind.

It was true, quite true, his carelessness (but then he had been so worn
out with watching), his fatal mistake, his heartless mistake (and yet he
would almost have given his own life for his children) had brought him
down to this slough of despond. There was no hope, the doctors never
told him of any, and he knew he could not bear this much longer.

There are times when some of us, left alone to pull out again our past,
and look at it in the light of a present, made remorseless and cruel
with the energy that comes of pain, are determined to blame ourselves
not only for the present misfortune, but to go back and back, and see in
everything that has gone wrong with us how, but for our own fault,
perversity, cowardice, stupidity, we might have escaped almost all the
ills under which we now groan.

How far are we right at such times? Most of us have passed through them,
and how much harder misfortune is to bear when complicated with the
bitterness of self-reproach and self-scorn!

It was not dark. John Mortimer remembered that this was Midsummer night.
A few stars were out; the moon, like a little golden keel, had gone
down. Quantities of white roses were out all over the place. He saw them
as faint, milky globes of whiteness in the dusk.

There were lights in the o