the drawing-room, and looked about for the
place he had last seen her in. There it was.... There. But his eyes
wandered from the place, for it was there he had seen the startled face,
the half mad face which he had seen afterwards at the window, quite mad.

On that sofa she usually sat; how often had he seen her sitting there!
And now he would not see her any more. And only three days ago she had
been sitting in the basket chair. How well he remembered her words, her
laughter, and now ... now; was it possible he never would hear her laugh
again? How frail a thing is human life, how shadow-like; one moment it
is here, the next it is gone. Here is her work-basket; and here the very
ball of wool which he had held for her to wind; and here is a novel
which she had lent to him, and which he had forgotten to take away. He
would never read it now; or perhaps he should read it in memory of her,
of her whom yesterday he parted with on the hills,--her little puritan
look, her external girlishness, her golden brown hair and the sudden
laugh so characteristic of her.... She had lent him this book--she who
was now but clay; she who was to have been his wife. His wife! The
thought struck him. Now he would never have a wife. What was there for
him to do? To turn his house into a Gothic monastery, and himself into a
monk. Very horrible and very bitter in its sheer grotesqueness was the
thought. It was as if in one moment he saw the whole of his life
summarised in a single symbol, and understood its vanity and its folly.
Ah, there was nothing for him, no wife, no life.... The tears welled up
in his eyes; the shock which in its suddenness had frozen his heart,
began to thaw, and grief fell like a penetrating rain.

We learn to suffer as we learn to love, and it is not to-day, nor yet
to-morrow, but in weeks and months to come, and by slow degrees, that
John Norton will understand the irreparableness of his loss. There is a
man upstairs who crouches like stone by his dead daughter's side; he is
motionless and pale as the dead, he is as great in his grief as an
expression of grief by Michael Angelo. The hours pass, he is unconscious
of them; he sees not the light dying on the sea, he hears not the
trilling of the canary. He knows of nothing but his dead child, and
that the world would be nothing to give to have her speak to him once
again. His is the humblest and the worthiest sorrow, but such sorrow
cannot affect John Norton. He has dream