Charlton walked up and down the shore, and wished he might take the drag-line into his own hands; but the mistaken kindness of our friends refuses us permission to do for our own dead, when doing anything would be a relief, and when doing for the dead would be the best possible utterance to the hopeless love which we call grief.

Mrs. Plausaby, weak and vain though she was, was full of natural affection.  Her love for Albert was checked a little by her feeling that there was no perfect sympathy between him and her.  But upon Katy she had lavished all her mother’s love.  People are apt to think that a love which is not intelligent is not real; there could be no greater mistake.  And the very smallness of the area covered by Mrs. Plausaby’s mind made her grief for Kate all the more passionate.  Katy occupied Albert’s mind jointly with Miss Minorkey, with ambition, with benevolence, with science, with literature, and with the great Philanthropinum that was to be built and to revolutionize the world by helping it on toward its “goal.”  But the interests that shared Mrs. Plausaby’s thoughts along with Katy were very few.  Of Albert she thought, and of her husband.  But she gave the chief place to Katy and her own appearance.  And so when the blow had come it was a severe one.  At midnight, Albert went back to try to comfort his mother, and received patiently all her weeping upbraidings of him for letting his sister go in the boat, he might have known it was not safe.  And then he hastened back again to the water, and watched the men in the boat still dragging without result.  Everybody on the shore knew just where the “Lady of the Lake” had capsized, and if accurate information, plentifully given, could have helped to find the bodies, it would soon have been accomplished.  The only difficulty was that this accurate information was very conflicting, no two of the positive eye-witnesses being able to agree.  So there was much shouting along shore, and many directions given, but all the searching for a long time proved vain.  All the shouting people hushed their shouting, and spoke in whispers whenever Albert came near.  To most men there is nothing more reverend than grief.  At half-past two o’clock, the man who held the rope felt a strange thrill, a sense of having touched one of the bodies.  He drew up his drag, and one of the hooks held a piece of a black silk cape.  When three or four more essays had been made, the body itself was brought to the surface, and the boat turned toward the shore.  There was no more shouting of directions now, not a single loud word was spoken, the oarsman rowed with a steady funereal rhythm, while Ben Towle, who had held the drag-rope, now held half out of water the recovered corpse.  Albert leaned forward anxiously to see the face of Katy, but it was Jane Downing, the girl who was drowned first.  Her father took the body in his arms, drew it out on shore, and wept over it in a quiet fashion for a while.  Then strong and friendly neighbors lifted it, and bore it before him to his house, while the man followed in a dumb grief.