A remarkable, a perfectly indescribable change had come over the little face, it looked so wise.  “You’d better kiss me now,” she said, with a wistful, quaint composure.

“Yes, my treasure.”

“I can’t say my prayers to-night, papa,” she presently added, “I suppose you’ll have to say them for me.”  And before he could believe that he must part with her she was gone.

Little Janie, his little Janie.  As he sat in the dusk that 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 opened rooms up-stairs.  It was very hot; sometimes he saw the nurses passing about.  Presently he saw Emily.  She was to be one of the watchers that night with Anastasia.