The death of the child. For a time that made of existence a cruel buffet, a sore bruise. The parents grieved. But time dealt with that grief—time and inner strength. At length it diffused itself, adding its own hue to many-tinted consciousness, its own strain to life’s vast orchestration, but no longer darkening and making to throb all moments of the waking day. They had within them a coördinating, harmonizing power, and sorrow brought its own wealth and added to the whole. The outward activities of life narrowed, indeed, upon this islet. But here also they took circumstance and enlarged its bounds and deepened its meaning. They brought will and intellect to bear upon environment, moulded it as far as might be and increased their havings. Here nor nowhere in this universe could they be less than interested. Flotsam upon this islet, yet here as elsewhere the mind found food and field of action and through small doorways passed into wide countries. Love burned clear, love of man and woman. It kept its heyday. But beside it rose, higher and more massive than in the peopled, busy island, other ranges of the mind. The child’s death—and the loss of the Indian village and of the old chief and the recurring vision of that oppression and the inhumanity of their kind—and the deep loneliness of this place—all wrought upon them. Moreover, the spring of inward growth was strong and constant. Year by year, with Joan as with Aderhold, the spirit travelled further in all its dimensions. The mind.... Here upon this span of earth the old ache for knowledge, the old brooding and longing of the mind came back to Aderhold, came more imperiously, larger, wider-robed. This ball of earth and the criss-cross of movement upon it. This sun and the chain that held to it the ball of earth. What was the chain? These stars and clouds of stars—this sea of ether—light in waves.... Again, the growth of plants—motion fluent as a stream. And the life that dwelt in shells—that made its armour and outgrew it.... Ceaseless change, transition,—kinds linked by likeness to other kinds, kinds growing out of other kinds, the trunk branching. He thought that all kinds might have branched from one or few, and the selfsame sap in all. He did not believe in a myriad unconnected, arbitrary creations.... But if the least leaf and tendril knew motion, alteration, growth, then the sap, too, knew it—the sap that was supposed to be so moveless, so perfected.... Kin and kin again—one and one again.