but cannot, being human, avert the miseries which to some unhappy individuals follow from the 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 the strange occurrence came of which I have now to tell.  Can I call it an occurrence?  My eyes were on my book, when I thought I heard the sound of a door opening and shutting, but so far away and faint that if real at all it must have been in a far corner of the house.  I did not move except to lift my eyes from the book as one does instinctively the better to listen; when—­But I cannot tell, nor have I ever been able to describe