into the world--not unfaithful, but consoled and soothed. Nothing had happened to him to break this sensation of rest from trouble, and what happened now was not painful. It was only the sudden return of thoughts which had been in abeyance. She seemed to come and stand by him, as she used to do, looking over his shoulder, asking after his work. ‘What are you doing?’ he seemed to hear her say--leaning over him with that familiar proprietorship of him and all his works and ways which was so sweet. Why had this visitation come to him to-day? Of course it must have been some impression on his nerves which thus reflected itself through his being. Some chance contact had stirred one of those strings which move what we call feelings in the strange machinery of our puppet nature. He thought somehow that when he had said this it explained the mystery. All at once, like a gale of spring, like a sudden thaw--or like someone coming into the room; though the last metaphor was not so fine as the others, it was the most true. Few of our mental processes (he would have allowed) are pure thought--this was not thought at all; he felt as if she stood by him--she whom he had lost: as if their life came back as it used to be. His grief for her, he knew, had been lulled to rest, and it was not any revival of the sharpness and bitterness of that grief which moved him: it was a return for a few minutes of the life they had lived together, of the conditions which life had borne before. Perhaps it was simply because his sister was there, and the sound of the two feminine voices, hers and Cara’s, at the breakfast-table, had brought back memories of the old times. He leant his elbows on his open book and his chin in the hollow of his hands. What a different life it had been! What were his societies now, his articles, all his ‘work,’ to the first spontaneous living of those days that were dead? How she would come in familiar, sure of her right to be wherever he was--not timid, like Cara, who never knew whether her father would be pleased or not pleased to see her, nor reverential, like good Cherry, who admired and wondered at his books and his writing. He knew how these two would look at any moment if need or business brought them knocking to his door. But he never could tell how _she_ would look, so various were her aspects, never the same--two women sometimes in one moment, turning to tears or to sunshine in the twinkling of an eye, cheering him, provoking him, stimulating him. Ah, what a change! life might have its soothings now, its consolations, little makings up and props, to give it the appearance of being the same life as before, but nothing could ever make it what it had been. He had not died of it, neither would he die of it--the grief that kills is rare; but whatever might happen to him in the world, so much was certain, that the delight of life was over, the glory gone out of it. And he did not wish it to be otherwise, he said to himself.