It was years, literally, before I got over it. Indeed, I have never got over it--never shall, while I have any power to remember things. Death--we all know, more or less, what it means to the living whom it has robbed. To lose a child--the mothers know, at any rate! It is no use talking about it. Besides, there are no words to talk with that can possibly explain. I often hear the remark that my husband has the most patient temper in the world, and I realise its truth when I think of that dreadful time--how I must have wearied and discouraged him, and how he never once reproached me for it, even by a glum look. He knew I could not help it. For one thing, I was ill--physically ill, with the doctor coming to see me. He ordered me tonics, stimulants, a complete change of scene, and so on, but no doctor's prescriptions were any good for my complaint. Winding a watch with a broken mainspring won't make it go. Tonics gave me headaches--tonics accompanied by constant tears and sleeplessness--and, hideous as the house was, with an empty place staring at me from every point to which I could turn my eyes, I knew it would be worse elsewhere. I clung to my own bed, my own privacy, my home where I could do as I liked and shut out the foolish would-be sympathisers and their futile condolences; and I could not bear to leave the other children. Once you have lost a child, you never again feel any confidence that the rest are safe; you seem to _know_ they are going to die if they but catch a cold or scratch a finger, and that they will have no chance at all if you let them out of your sight. Besides, there were things to see to--the poultry, for instance, which was under my charge--if only I could have seen to them! I tried, but sorrow made me stupid; and when the incubator was found stone-cold, and again overheated, and on one occasion burnt to ashes with dozens of poor chicks inside, and when dozens more were drowned in a storm for want of timely shelter--all fine, thriving birds, when, you couldn't get a decent turkey in Melbourne for under a pound--I suppose it was my fault. But Tom always said, "Never mind--don't you worry yourself, Polly," and his first thought was to get me a glass of wine. He was like an old nurse in the way he cosseted and coddled me. When I was more ill than usual, he thought nothing of sitting up all night by my bedside, and making little messes for me in the kitchen with his own hands. He never even said, as I have heard men say at the first starting of tears--not after they have been flowing, like mine, for weeks and weeks--"Why don't you make an effort to control yourself? You know perfectly well that crying only makes you worse and does nobody any good"--as if a poor mother cried from choice and perversity and the pleasure of doing it, when her heart was broken! He knew my heart was broken. He understood. No one else understood. They all thought I could control myself if I liked.