But the grief, the shock to Maggie was too much for my dear, love-nurtured child.  A sort of awful and desperate strength came on me after that; I felt somehow, day by day, that I must just put away my own grief till a quiet hour, in order that I might sustain and guard the child; but her heart was broken, I think, though they say that no one dies of sorrow.  She lay long ill—­so utterly frail, so appealing in her grief, that I could think of nothing but saving her.  Was it a kind of selfishness that needed to be broken down in me?  Perhaps it was!  Every single tendril of my heart seemed to grow round the child and clasp her close; she was all that I had left, and in some strange way she seemed to be all that I had lost too.  And then she faded out of life, not knowing that she was fading, but simply too tired to live; and my desire alone seemed to keep her with me.  Till at last, seeing her weariness and weakness, I let my desire go; I yielded, I gave her to God, and He took her, as though He had waited for my consent.

And now that I am alone, I will say, with such honesty as I can muster, that I have no touch of self-pity, no rebellion.  It is all too deep and dark for that.  I am not strong enough even to wish to die; I have no wishes, no desires at all.  The three seem for ever about me, in my thoughts and in my dreams.  When Alec died, I used to wake up to the fact, day after day, with a trembling dismay.  Now it is not like that.  I can give no account of what I do.  The smallest things about me seem to take up my mind.  I can sit for an hour by the hearth, neither reading nor thinking, just watching the flame flicker over the coals, or the red heart of the fire eating its way upwards and outwards.  I can sit on a sunshiny morning in the garden, merely watching with a strange intentness what goes on about me, the uncrumpling leaf, the snowdrop pushing from the mould, the thrush searching the lawn, the robin slipping from bough to bough, the shapes of the clouds, the dying ray.  I seem to have no motive either to live or to die.  I retrace in memory my walks with Maggie, I can see her floating hair, and how she leaned to me; I can sit, as I used to sit reading. by Maud’s side, and see her face changing as the book’s mood changed, her clear eye, her strong delicate hands.  I seem as if I had awaked from a long and beautiful dream.  People sometimes come and see me, and I can see the pity in their faces and voices; I can see it in the anxious care with which my good servants surround me; but I feel that it is half disingenuous in me to accept it, because I need no pity.  Perhaps there is something left for me to do in the world:  there seems no reason otherwise why I should linger here.