December 15, 1889.

I have kept no record of these weeks.  They have been full of business, sadness, and yet of hope.  We went back home for a time; we made our farewells, and it moved me strangely to see that our departure was viewed almost with consternation.  It is Maud’s loss that will be felt.  I have lived very selfishly and dully myself, but even so I was half-glad to find that even I should be missed.  At such a time everything is forgotten and forgiven, and such grudging, peaceful neighbourliness as even I have shown seems appreciated and valued.  It was a heartrending business reviving our sorrow, and it plunged me for a time into my old dry bitterness of spirit.  But I hardened my heart as best I could, and felt more deeply than ever, how far beyond my powers of endurance it would have been to have taken up the old life, and Alec not there.  Again and again it was like a knife plunged into my heart with an almost physical pain.  Not so with Maud and Maggie—­it was to them a treasure of precious memories, and they could dare to indulge their grief.  I can’t write of it, I can’t think of it.  Wherever I turned, I saw him in a hundred guises—­as a tiny child, as a small, sturdy boy, as the son we lost.

We have let the house to some very kind and reasonable people, who have made things very easy to us; and to me at least it was a sort of heavy joy to take the last meal in the old home, to drive away, to see the landscape fade from sight.  I shall never willingly return.  It would seem to me like a wilful rolling among the thorns of life, a gathering-in of spears into one’s breast.  I seemed like a naked creature that had lost its skin, that shrank and bled at every touch.

February 10, 1890.

I have been house-hunting, and I do not pretend to dislike it.  The sight of unknown houses, high garden walls, windows looking into blind courts, staircases leading to lofts, dark cupboards, old lumber, has a very stimulating effect on my imagination.  Perhaps, too, I sometimes think, these old places are full of haunting spiritual presences, clinging, half tearfully, half joyfully to the familiar scenes, half sad, perhaps, that they did not make a finer thing of the little confined life; half glad to be free—­as a man, strong and well, might look with a sense of security into a room where he had borne an operation.  But I have never believed much in haunted rooms.  The Father’s many mansions can be hardly worth deserting for the little, dark houses of our tiny life.

I disliked some of the houses intensely—­so ugly and pretentious, so inconvenient and dull; but even so it is pleasant in fancy to plan the life one would live there, the rooms one would use.  One house touched me inexpressibly.  It was a house I knew from the outside in a little town where I used to go and spend a few weeks every year with an old aunt of mine.  The name of the little town—­I saw it in an agent’s list—­had a sort