Maggie seems to feel it differently.  A child accepts a changed condition with perhaps a sharper pang, but with a swift accustoming to what irreparably is.  She weeps at the thought of him sometimes, but without the bitter resistance, the futile despair which makes me agonise.  That she can be interested, distracted, amused, is a great help to me; but nothing seems to minister to my dear Maud, except the impassioned revival, for it is so, of our earliest first love.  It has come back to bless us, that deep and intimate absorption that had moved into a gentler comradeship.  The old mysterious yearning to mingle life and dreams, and almost identities, has returned in fullest force; the years have rolled away, and in the loss of her calm strength and patience, we are as lovers again.  The touch of her hand, the glance of her eye, thrill through me as of old.  It is a devout service, an eager anticipation of her lightest wish that possesses me.  I am no longer tended; I tend and serve.  There is something soft, appealing, wistful about her that seems to give her back an almost childlike dependence, till my grief almost goes from me in joy that I can sustain and aid her.

September 7, 1889.

Another trouble has fallen upon us.  I have had a very grievous letter from my cousin, who succeeded by arrangement, on my father’s death, to the business.  He has been unfortunate in his affairs; he has thrown money away in speculation.  The greater part of my income came from the business.  I suppose the arrangement was a bad one, but the practice was so sound and secure in my father’s life that it never occurred to me to doubt its stability.  The chief part of my income, some nine hundred a year, came to me from this source.  Apart from that, I have some three or four hundreds from invested money of my own, and Maud has upwards of two hundred a year.  I am going off to-morrow to L——­ to meet my cousin, and go into the matter.  I don’t at present understand how things are.  His letter is full of protestations and self-recrimination.  We can live, I suppose, if the worst comes to the worst, but in a very different way.  Perhaps we may even have to sell our pleasant house.  The strange thing is that I don’t feel this all more acutely, but I seem to have lost the power of suffering for any other reason than because Alec is dead.

September 12, 1889.

I have come back to-night from some weary nightmare days with my poor cousin.  The thing is as bad as it can be.  The business will be acquired by Messrs. F——­, the next most leading solicitors.  With the price they will give, and with the sacrifice of my cousin’s savings, and the assets of the firm, the money can just be paid.  We shall have some six hundred a year to live upon; my cousin is to enter the office of the F——­ firm as an ordinary clerk.  The origin of the disaster is a melancholy one; it was not that he himself might profit, but to increase the income of some clients