Adam yet.  There was still a great remnant of pain, and this he felt would subsist as long as her pain was not a memory, but an existing thing, which he must think of as renewed with the light of every new morning.  But we get accustomed to mental as well as bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it.  It becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease as possible for us.  Desire is chastened into submission, and we are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence and act as if we were not suffering.  For it is at such periods that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations, beyond any of which either our present or prospective self is the centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert.

That was Adam’s state of mind in this second autumn of his sorrow.  His work, as you know, had always been part of his religion, and from very early days he saw clearly that good carpentry was God’s will—­was that form of God’s will that most immediately concerned him.  But now there was no margin of dreams for him beyond this daylight reality, no holiday-time in the working-day world, no moment in the distance when duty would take off her iron glove and breast-plate and clasp him gently into rest.  He conceived no picture of the future but one made up of hard-working days such as he lived through, with growing contentment and intensity of interest, every fresh week.  Love, he thought, could never be anything to him but a living memory—­a limb lopped off, but not gone from consciousness.  He did not know that the power of loving was all the while gaining new force within him; that the new sensibilities bought by a deep experience were so many new fibres by which it was possible, nay, necessary to him, that his nature should intertwine with another.  Yet he was aware that common affection and friendship were more precious to him than they used to be—­that he clung more to his mother and Seth, and had an unspeakable satisfaction in the sight or imagination of any small addition to their happiness.  The Poysers, too—­hardly three or four days passed but he felt the need of seeing them and interchanging words and looks of friendliness with them.  He would have felt this, probably, even if Dinah had not been with them, but he had only said the simplest truth in telling Dinah that he put her above all other friends in the world.  Could anything be more natural?  For in the darkest moments of memory the thought of her always came as the first ray of returning comfort.  The early days of gloom at the Hall Farm had been gradually turned into soft moonlight by her presence; and in the cottage, too, for she had come at every spare moment to soothe and cheer poor Lisbeth, who had been stricken with a fear that subdued even her querulousness at the sight of her darling Adam’s grief-worn face.  He had become used to watching her light quiet movements,