'I am certainly very lonely,' she says to herself, with a sort of astonishment; 'it is a very unusual case. There has happened to me what happens commonly to people only at eighty: I have outlived everything! I was given very few people to love, to begin with; but I did love them well. I gave them my very best. Oh, you cannot say, any of you, that I did not give you my very best, and yet not one of you will stay with me. Not one of you. God--God! What have I done to be picked out of all the world for such a fate? Is it fair? Is it fair?' Her voice goes wailing out into the mist; but the dying world around her has no answer to give to her riddle. It is awaiting that to its own. She has thrown herself down on the seat under her hawthorn bower, and from its dull berries and sharp thorns, and few still-clinging yellow leaves, the cold drops drip on her bare head, mix with the scalding drops on her cheeks; but she feels them not as she lies there, huddled up, collapsed, and despairing. Not for long, however. By and by her soul, as is the way with souls habitually brave, puts on its courage again. She raises herself, and lifts her drowned and weary eyes, as if through the fogs and exhalations they would pierce to Him who, as all the world once thought, as many still hold to be a truth far dearer than life, sits in judgment and mercy beyond them. 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' she says solemnly. 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' CHAPTER XXXVIII 'I am not mad,--I would to heaven I were! For then 'tis like I should forget myself: Oh, if I could, what grief should I forget! Preach some philosophy to make me mad, And thou shalt be canonised, cardinal; For, being not mad, but sensible of grief, My reasonable part produces reason How I may be deliver'd of these woes, And teaches me to kill or hang myself: If I were mad, I should forget my son; Or madly think a babe of clouts were he. I am not mad; too well, too well I feel The different plague of each calamity.'