Roger recollected her face and voice and her foreign accent, and one or two things she said to him. I remember nothing of her but a kind of brooding warmth and care, tender caressing tones, and being watched by eyes with a look in them unlike any other, and then a day of weeping and silence and black dresses and sad faces, and a wandering about with a sense of something lost. Lost for ever out of my life. As much as by any possibility could be, Aunt Gretel made up the tenderness, and Aunt Dorothy the discipline; and my father did all he could to supply her place by a fatherly care softened into an uncommon passion by his sorrow, and deepened into the most sacred principle by his desire to remedy our loss. Yet, in looking back, I feel more and more we did indeed inevitably lose much. All these balancing and compensating cares and affections and restraints from every side yet missed something of the tender constraints and the heart-quickening warmth they would have had all living, blended, and consecrated in the one mother's heart. Yet to Roger, perhaps, the loss was at various points in his life even greater than to me. If she had lived, perchance the lessons we had to learn after that May Day would have been learned with less of blundering and heat. Yet how can I tell? It seems to me the true painter keeps his pictures in harmony not by mixing the colours on the palette, but by blending them on the canvass, not by painting in leaden monotonous grays, but by interweaving and contrasting countless tints of pure and varied colour. And in nature, in history, in life, it seems to me the Creator does the same. Yes, God forbid that in lamenting what we lost I should blaspheme the highest love--the love which, as Aunt Gretel says, takes every image of human affection, and fills and overfills it, and casts it away as too shallow; in its unutterable intensity putting as it were a tender paradox of slander on even a mother's love for her babes, and saying, "They may forget, yet will not I." For that love, we believe, gave and took away, and has led us through fasting and feasting, dangers and droughts, Marahs and Elims, chastenings and cherishings, ever since. CHAPTER III.