I had forgotten it and myself altogether, and now I can find neither. I can hardly believe in the pain and misery of the morning, it seems a dim, far-off memory. Is it not wonderful, Mother? Goodnight, my own darling. Yours very very lovingly, SOPHY. I do not know when I could so fully and entirely say, ‘I will lay me down _in peace_ and sleep, for Thou, Lord, only makest me to dwell in safety.’” Follows an undated fragment, probably written to her Mother next morning: “—passed other quiet wayfarers, just as heavily weighted. How gentle it ought to make one,—to see how utterly ignorant one may be of sorrow at one’s elbow,—how one can only be _generally_ tender to people, if one would escape striking down an already tottering neighbour because one does not and cannot know his needs. It is only God who sees _which_ is the bruised reed, and cherishes that specially,—or can do so. I am thinking how near 4 o’clock is coming. It may bring me a kiss and a word from my darling. I am sure tonight’s post will at any rate. Well, dear, I have you always and forever, and with you only I could never be desolate. And I have her too,—though she doesn’t know it now. Yours very very lovingly, SOPH.” “4.30 p.m. Thanks, many, darling, for your loving little note. You will know before this that the cloud is not dispersing in the way you mean,—that it has only more fully and certainly overspread the sky. Yet there is—and will be more and more, please God,—a light in it too.” “Dec. 16th 1861. 8.30 p.m. MY OWN DARLING MOTHER, Thanks so many for the loving little scrap of letter which I knew would come to comfort me. The sympathy is always delicious, but the active need for it is utterly gone. You will have got my last night’s letter, so Mother will not go to bed with a sad heart for her baby. Yesterday I was wondering how it should be possible that I should ever live out the next three days till I got home to you. Now every sort of trouble seems to have fled utterly away. I never knew before the meaning of the words, ‘the peace that passeth understanding’.... I every now and then wake up with a kind of start of wonder to find such a sunny smile of heart gladness all over my face. And people see it too. It would be very odd if they didn’t when the whole world is changed to me. It is the most wonderful separation of the inner from the outer world that I ever knew. I suppose nothing is changed in the physical world, but everything seems for me bright and golden,—as in my Welsh tour with Octavia (I can speak of it and her now with perfect quiet peace), as in those days at Hurst.