Kate did not call again upon the priest. Her father came to the conclusion that there was nothing in his suspicions, and that she had been suffering from one of her not uncommon fits of nervous restlessness and depression. This was a mercy, for his bodily health had begun to fail. The winter was very severe, and in the dark days just before Christmas he took to his bed and presently died, having suffered no pain and with no obscuration of his mind until the last ten minutes. Kate had nursed him with pious care: she was alone with him and closed his eyes about four o’clock in the morning. At first she was overcome with hysterical passion, and this was succeeded by shapeless thoughts which streamed up in her incessantly as the mists stream up from a valley at sunrise. Not until day broke did she leave the room and waken the household. An epoch is created rather by the person than by the event. The experience which changes one man is nothing to another. Some will pass through life without a mark from anything that happens to them; others are transformed by a smile or a cloud. So also the same experience will turn different men into totally different paths. Kate had never seen death before. It smote her with such force that for months and months her father was before her eyes and she could not convince herself that he was not with her. But she went no further towards Roman Catholicism. She let the facts stand. Once when she was walking on the moors she stretched out her arms again and was urged to pray, but she felt that her prayer would be loss of strength and she stood erect. For nearly a twelvemonth she simply endured. She remembered a story in an old _Amulet_, one of a series of annuals, bound in crimson cloth and fashionable at that time, of a sailor stranded on a rock in the sea. The waves rose to his lips, but he threw back his head, and at that moment there was a pause and the tide turned. It might turn for her or it might not; she must not move. She read scarcely any books and lived much in the open air. The autumn was one of extraordinary splendour. September rains after a dry summer washed the air and filled the tarns and becks. Wherever she went she was accompanied by that most delicious sound of falling waters. The clouds, which through July and August had been nothing but undefined, barren vapour, gathered themselves together and the interspaces of sky were once more brilliantly blue. Day after day earth and heaven were almost too beautiful, for it was painful that her finite apprehension should be unequal to such infinite loveliness. She received no such answer as that for which she hoped when she knelt by the grey rock, but that is the way with the celestial powers; they reply to our passionate demands by putting them aside and giving us that for which we did not ask. _We know not how to pray as we ought_. MR. WHITTAKER’S RETIREMENT