We are to go away.  Maggie droops like a faded flower, and for the first time I realise, in trying to comfort and distract her, that I have not lost everything.  We are much together, and seeing her thus pine and fade stirs a dread, in the heart that had been so cold, that I may lose her too.  At last we are drawn together.  She came to say good-night to me last night, and a gush of love passed through me, like the wind stirring the strings of a harp to music.  “My precious darling, my comfort,” I said; the words put, it seemed, on my lips, by some deeper power.  She clung to me, crying softly.  Yet, is it strange to say it, that simple utterance seems almost to have revived her, to have given her pride and courage?  But Maud is still almost a mystery to me.  Who can tell how she suffers—­I cannot—­it seems to have quickened and enriched her love and tenderness; she seems to have a secret that I cannot come near to sharing; she does not repine, rebel, resist; she lives in some region of unapproachable patience and love.  She goes daily to the grave, but I cannot visit it or think of it.  The sight of the church-tower on my walks gives me a throb of dismay.  But now we are going away.  We have been lent a little house in a quiet seaside place; I suppose I am ill—­at least, I am aware of a deep and unutterable fatigue at times, when I can rouse myself to nothing, but sit unoccupied, musing, glad to be alone, and only dreading the slightest interruption, the smallest duty.  I know by some subtle sense that I am seldom absent from Maud’s thoughts; but, with her incredible courage and patience, she betrays nothing by word or glance.  She is absolutely patient, entirely self-forgetful; she quietly relieves me of anything I have to do; she alters arrangements a dozen times a day, with a ready smile; and yet it almost seems to me as if I had lost her too.

August 30, 1889.

Our route lay through Cambridge; we had to change there and wait; so we drove down to the town to look at my old college.  There it lay, the charming, pretty, quiet place, blinking lazily out of its deep-set barred windows in the bright sun, just the same, it seemed, as ever, though perhaps a touch more mellow and more settled; every corner and staircase haunted with old ghosts for me.  I could put a name to every set of rooms, flash an incident to every door and window.  In my heavy, apathetic mood the memory of my life there seemed like a memory of some one else, moving in golden light, talking and laughing in firelit rooms, lingering in moonlit nights by the bridge, wondering what life was going to bring.  It seemed like turning the pages of some old illuminated book with bright pictures, where the very sunlight is the purest and stiffest gold.  The men I knew, the friends I lived with, admired, loved—­ where are they? scattered to all parts of the earth, parted utterly from me, some of them dead, alas! and silent.  It came over me with a thrill of sharpest