and sweetness are the real stuff of life, waiting for her behind the cloud.  I don’t want to. disillusion her; I want to establish her faith in happiness and love, so that it cannot be shaken.  That is a better philosophy, when all is said and done, than the stoical fortitude that anticipates dreariness, that draws the shadow over the sun, that overvalues endurance.  One endures by instinct; but one must be trained to love.

February 6, 1891.

It is months since I have opened this book; it has lain on my table all through the dreadful hours—­I write the word down conventionally, and yet it is not the right word at all, because I have merely been stunned and numbed.  I simply could not suffer any more.  I smiled to myself, as the man in the story, who was broken on the wheel, smiled when they struck the second and the third blow.  I knew why he smiled; it was because he had dreaded it so much, and when it came there was nothing to dread, because he simply did not feel it.

To-night I just pick up idly the dropped thread.  Perhaps it is a sign, this faint desire to make a little record, of the first tingling of returning life.  Something stirs in me, and I will not resist it; it may be read by some one that comes after me, by some one perhaps who feels that his own grief is supreme and unique, and that no one has ever suffered so before.  He may learn that there have been others in the dark valley before him, that the mist is full of pilgrims stumbling on, falling, rising again, falling again, lying stupefied in a silence which is neither endurance nor patience.

Maud was taken from me first; she went without a word or a sign.  She was better that day, she declared, than she had felt for some time; she was on the upward grade.  She walked a few hundred yards with Maggie and myself, and then she went back; the last sight I had of her alive was when she stood at the corner and waved her hand to us as we went out of sight.  I am glad I looked round and saw her smile.  I had not the smallest or faintest premonition of what was coming; indeed, I was lighter of mood than I had been for some time.  We came in; we were told that she was tired and had gone up to lie down.  As she did not come down to tea, I went up and found her lying on her bed, her head upon her hand—­dead.  The absolute peace and stillness of her attitude showed us that she had herself felt no access of pain.  She had lain down to rest, and she had rested indeed.  Even at my worst and loneliest, I have been able to be glad that it was even so.  If I could know that I should die thus in joy and tranquillity, it would be a great load off my mind.