suddenly of fever, and the news had reached her only that morning. She
is a devoted mother, and she wept frankly and unashamedly as she told
me the sad details. Her grief was evidently deep and profound; and yet,
strange to say, I found myself realising that this event, entailing
peculiarly tragic consequences which I need not here define, was to the
gallant old lady, in spite of, or rather in consequence of, her grief,
a thing which heightened the values of existence, put a fire into her
pulses, and quickened the sense of living. It was not that she did not
feel the loss; she suffered acutely; but for all that, it was an
experience of a stirring kind, and her indomitable appetite for
sensation was fed and sustained by it. She was full of schemes for the
widow and children; she was melted with heart-felt grief for them; but
I perceived that she was in no way dejected by the experience; it
called all her powers, even the power of bearing grief, into play; and
the draining of the bitter cup was more congenial to her than inactive
monotony. It gave me a strong sense of her vitality, and I felt that it
was a really splendid thing to be able to approach a grief with this
fiery zest, rather than to collapse into a dreary and hysterical
depression. There were fifty things she could do, and she meant to do
them every one, and secretly exulted in the task. It was even, I felt,
a distinct pleasure to her to describe the melancholy circumstances of
the event in the fullest detail. It was not a pensive or luxurious
emotion, but a tumult of vehement feeling, bearing the bark of the soul
triumphantly along. She would have been distressed and even indignant
if I had revealed my thoughts; but the fact was there for all that;
instead of brooding or fretting over small affairs, she was face to
face with one of the great unanswerable, unfathomable facts of life,
and her spirit drank in the solemnity, the greatness of it, as a flower
after a drought drinks in the steady plunging rain.