The two retreats which I have mentioned were now all that were left to me.  In the back-parlour someone from outside gave me occasional lessons of a desultory character.  The breakfast-room was often haunted by visitors, unknown to me by face or name,—­ ladies, who used to pity me and even to pet me, until I became nimble in escaping from their caresses.  Everything seemed to be unfixed, uncertain; it was like being on the platform of a railway-station waiting for a train.  In all this time, the agitated, nervous presence of my Father, whose pale face was permanently drawn with anxiety, added to my perturbation, and I became miserable, stupid—­as if I had lost my way in a cold fog.

Had I been older and more intelligent, of course, it might have been of him and not of myself that I should have been thinking.  As I now look back upon that tragic time, it is for him that my heart bleeds,—­for them both, so singularly fitted as they were to support and cheer one another in an existence which their own innate and cultivated characteristics had made little hospitable to other sources of comfort.  This is not to be dwelt on here.  But what must be recorded was the extraordinary tranquillity, the serene and sensible resignation, with which at length my parents faced the awful hour.  Language cannot utter what they suffered, but there was no rebellion, no repining; in their case even an atheist might admit that the overpowering miracle of grace was mightily efficient.

It seems almost cruel to the memory of their opinions that the only words which rise to my mind, the only ones which seem in the least degree adequate to describe the attitude of my parents, had fallen from the pen of one whom, in their want of imaginative sympathy, they had regarded as anathema.  But John Henry Newman might have come from the contemplation of my Mother’s death-bed when he wrote:  ’All the trouble which the world inflicts upon us, and which flesh cannot but feel,—­sorrow, pain, care, bereavement,—­these avail not to disturb the tranquillity and the intensity with which faith gazes at the Divine Majesty.’  It was ‘tranquillity’, it was not the rapture of the mystic.  Almost in the last hour of her life, urged to confess her ‘joy’ in the Lord, my Mother, rigidly honest, meticulous in self-analysis, as ever, replied:  ’I have peace, but not joy.  It would not do to go into eternity with a lie in my mouth.’

When the very end approached, and her mind was growing clouded, she gathered her strength together to say to my Father, ’I shall walk with Him in white.  Won’t you take your lamb and walk with me?’ Confused with sorrow and alarm, my Father failed to understand her meaning.  She became agitated, and she repeated two or three times:  ‘Take our lamb, and walk with me!’ Then my Father comprehended, and pressed me forward; her hand fell softly upon mine and she seemed content.  Thus was my dedication, that had begun in my cradle, sealed with the most solemn, the most poignant and irresistible insistence, at the death-bed of the holiest and purest of women.  But what a weight, intolerable as the burden of Atlas, to lay on the shoulders of a little fragile child!