“You will wake and remember, and understand,”—­my voice broke and tears came, unbidden tears which I did not even desire to conceal—­ and in that moment the spirit of my wife came near to me, and soul looked into the eyes of soul, with a perfect and bewildering joy, the very joy of God.

October 10, 1889.

We have had the kindest, dearest letters from our neighbours about our last misfortune.  But no one seems to anticipate that we shall be obliged to leave the place.  They naturally suppose that I shall be able to make as large an income as I want by writing.  And so I suppose I could.  I talked the whole matter over with Maud, and said I would abide by her decision.  I confessed that I had an extreme repugnance to the thought of turning out books for money, books which I knew to be inferior; but I also said that if she could not bear to leave the place, I had little doubt that I could, for the present at all events, make enough money to render it possible for us to continue to live there.  I said frankly that it would be a relief to me to leave a house so sadly haunted by memory, and that I should myself prefer to live elsewhere, framing our household on very simple lines—­and to let the power of writing come back if it would, not to try and force it.  It would be a dreadful prospect to me to live thus, overshadowed by recollection, working dismally for money; but I suppose it would be possible, even bracing.  Maud did not hesitate:  she spoke quite frankly; on the one hand the very associations, which I dread most, were evidently to her a source of sad delight; and the thought of strangers living in rooms so hallowed by grief was like a profanation.  Then there was the fact of all her relations with our friends and neighbours; but she said quite simply that my feeling outweighed it all, and that she would far rather begin life afresh somewhere else, than put me in the position I described.  We determined to try and find a small house in the neighbourhood of her own old home in Gloucestershire; and this thought, I am sure, gave her real happiness.  We determined at once what we would do; we would let our house for a term of years, take what furniture we needed, and dispose of the rest; we arranged to go off to Gloucestershire, as soon as possible, to look for a house.  We both realise that we must learn to retrench at once.  We shall have less than half our former income, counting in what we hope to get from the old house.  I am not at all afraid of that.  I always vaguely disliked living as comfortably as we did—­but it will not be agreeable to have to calculate all our expenses—­that may perhaps mend itself, if I can but begin my writing again.

All this helps me—­I am ashamed to say how much—­though sometimes the thought of all the necessary arrangements weighs on me like a leaden weight, on days when I fall back into a sad, idle, hopeless repining.  Sometimes it seems as if the old happy life was all broken up and gone for ever; and, so strange a thing is memory and imagination, that even the months overshadowed by the loss of my faculty of work seem to me now impossibly fragrant and beautiful, my sufferings unreal and unsubstantial.  Real trouble, real grief, have at least the bracing force of actuality, and sweep aside with a strong hand all artificial self-made miseries and glooms.