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 dreamed too much and reflected too much on the meaning of life; his suffering is too original in himself, too self-centred, and at the same time too much, based on the inherent misery of existence, to allow him to project himself into and suffer with any individual grief, no matter how nearly it might be allied to him and to his personal interest.  He knew his weakness in this direction, and now he gladly welcomed the coming of grief, for indeed he had felt not a little shocked at the aridness of his heart, and frightened lest his eyes should remain dry even to the end.

Suddenly he remembered that the Miss Austins had said that they would call to-morrow early for Kitty, to take her to Leywood to lunch....  They were going to have some tennis in the afternoon.  He too was expected there.  They must be told what had occurred.  It would be terrible if they came calling for Kitty under her window, and she lying dead!  This slight incident in the tragedy wrung his heart, and the effort of putting the facts upon paper brought the truth home to him, and lured and led him to see down the lifelong range of consequences.  The doctor too, he thought, must be warned of what had happened.  And with the letter telling the sad story in his hand, and illimitable sorrow in his soul, he went out in the evening air.  It was just such an evening as yester evening—­a little softer, a little lovelier, perhaps; earth, sea, and sky appeared like an exquisite vision upon whose lips there is fragrance, yet in whose eyes a glow of passion still survives.