Here we live, as I say, Idonia and I, but no longer my father, who after we had been married but a year, died. Worn out by that lingering malady of which I have spoken, and having been for so long a while confined to that poor shelter where, I learned, was to be had the merest necessaries but nothing to foster his strength, he soon gave manifest signs that the betterment of his fortune had come too late to advantage him. To himself it had of necessity been well known, but the knowledge neither discouraged him at all, nor caused him to exchange his habitual discourse for those particular sentences that men in such case will sometimes burden their speech withal. In Idonia's company he seemed to take an extraordinary quiet pleasure, and indeed spoke with her (as she afterwards told me) of matters he had seldom enlarged upon with me, but to which she opened so ready an apprehension as drew him on from familiar chat to reveal to her the most cherished speculations of his mind. To me he continued as I always remember him, using that gentle satire that was a sauce to all his sayings. He would oftenwhiles question me of the difficulties and dangers of my sojourn in London, but although he would hear me attentively, I knew he took small pleasure in tales of tumult and strife. There was in his nature that touch of woman that, however, is not womanliness but rather is responsive to the best a woman hath; and thus it was, in the perfect sympathy that marked his converse with Idonia, I read, more clearly than I had done in all the years we had lived together, the measure of his loss in losing his wife, and the pitiful great need which he endeavoured so continuously, in his reading, to fill. I had supposed him to be a complete Stoick, and to have embraced without reservation the teaching of that famous school; but Idonia, to whom I spoke of it, told me that it was not altogether so. "For," she said, "it was but a week since, as we sat together on the side of the moor yonder, that he repeated to me a sentence of the Roman Emperor's, whose works he ever carrieth about with him, in which he bids a wise man expect each day to meet with idle men and fools and busybodies and arrogant men. But that, your father said, was to bid a man shut himself up alone in a high tower, whence he should look down upon his fellows instead of mixing with them and trying to understand them. Expect rather, he said, to meet each day with honest, kindly men; in which expectation if you be disappointed, then consider whether the cause of offence lieth not in you; the other man being full as likely to be inoffensive as yourself." Of time he was wont to say, "When one says to you: There is no time like the present, reply to him that indeed there is no time but the present: future and past being but as graven figures on a milestone which a man readeth and passeth upon his road."