The heart can only stand a certain number of vital, staggering blows. After the assessing business was over I was free, so to speak, of what remained of my own possessions, and I have been going round every day immediately after breakfast and stopping until dusk drove me away. Lots of people wanted to help. I didn’t want them—I had to be alone with my ghosts. Florence would come round now and again when her work was done, or between whiles, and then we just stood together thinking unutterable things. She is not quite a servant, as you know, but a dear faithful, understanding friend who lives in the heart of us, and loves us every one. But mostly I was alone, my job to gather up the fragments—the little things, and try to gauge and co-ordinate the whole before the removal men came to take everything away. I found quite a lot of things and carried them one by one to one of the pantries where a shelf remained intact. My greatest find, in a place with which they had no connection whatever, was four cut crystal baskets belonging to the old Sheffield plate epergne, we used as a centrepiece in the days when table decoration was of the heavy ornate type. How pleased I was to get them, you can’t think! I held them tight quite a long time, gave them a little polish with the corner of my apron, and then took them to the pantry shelf aforesaid, where I regarded them with a species of adoration as the nucleus of some future glass cupboard collection, when war has ceased to be. But I think it is ordained that for me there shall be no new glass cupboard. When I got back next day, two of them had gone. I pinched myself, wondering whether, like some of the college boys after a night out, I had been seeing double. Then my friend, the big policeman, told me he had turned out some well-dressed people wandering through the ruins after I had left. It was no common thief who took these little things. There were articles of more value beside them. No, it was some horrible woman who coveted a souvenir from the Zeppelined house, and took what she fancied most. I rather wish she had taken the four, then I might have amused myself by dreaming that they had been found. It was a mean cold-blooded unsisterly kind of theft. It almost deserves to have the adjective Hunnish attached as a label. Every day this sad task of mine has been going on, for more than a week, and now, tomorrow, this being Sunday, the workmen are coming in and the removal men, and the few sticks, at least such as are worth removing, will be taken away to a furniture hospital for repair.