CHAPTER XXXIX.

REUNITED.

"SHE and I," writes Mrs. Constable, "spent the greater part of September, 1881, together in London. She was fairly well and very energetic, and full of interest in all the details of the furniture of our new house which she helped me to choose; going in to every particular with her own. peculiar lively interest, which she brought to bear upon the choosing of the pattern of a cretonne with the same sweet intensity as if it had been a thing of far more moment. She and I went to see several of her dear friends, and had very pleasant days together. Anything seen or done with her had a charm it can never have again. How she enjoyed things! The pretty things in the shops, the lights reflected in the river as we crossed Westminster Bridge at night, the good looks of some of the young faces we saw in the streets or in the train-everything touched her. The Sundays were delightful, and she enjoyed the variety and the music delighted in the music at the Carmelites, the service at the Foundling Hospital, Canon Duckworth's sermon in the Abbey after the president's death, and our last service together at St. George's, Southwark, where we heard Rossini's "Stabat Mater" gloriously given. It was music she specially delighted in, and those exquisite airs thrilled her with delight. But she said some weeks afterwards to her friend Mrs. Ruck: It is curious how I now never wish a pleasure repeated. Much as I enjoyed my visit to Mr. Herkomer, and all the interesting places we went to, I have no wish to see them again. I liked Mary to have the pleasure of that pleasant time, and enjoyed it

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with her.' We came back together to Chester, where she spent two days with her dear Hessie Howard, going over one day to Rhyl to spend a few hours with my dear mother. Then I went to my mother, and my sister went back to Patterdale with Aunt Lucy, and was with her for over three weeks. On the thirty-first of October Edith came away, and as she left the station she leant her head out of the window for a last look at the dear one, who was standing on the platform, and who on seeing her pointed with her hand to the sky above.

"She returned that evening to Patterdale, and was alone for the next few days; a very rare event with her, as she generally had some loved friend with her — and how her friends valued those quiet peaceful times with her in that lovely country! Quiet as the life there was, it was full of interests, for she had many friends among the cottagers sick and blind people who claimed her advice and had great faith in her readiness to help them. And then what letters came to her!

"At this time she was busily working at some curtains she intended for a Christmas gift to an Edinburgh friend. They were a marvellous piece of work, and had been an amusement for her for about three months. In the borders she had worked different flowers, and a great many of Esop's fables, which she had carried out with wonderful spirit and expression. In one of her letters she said she had been working the fable of the Wolf and the Lamb, and 'quite made her heart ache over the pleading expression of the lamb!' In another letter at this time she says to me, 'I sit over my curtains because they must be done, and shall probably go out to please the dear fellow,' my dog, who was having a happy time with her, but I should like to be in bed.'

To Mr. and Mrs. Loomis.

PATTERDALE, Oct. 23, 1881.

The line that separates the normal from the abnormal is very fine, almost indefinable, and men of the most spiritual type, men who have inaugurated or stimulated great religious movements, have always been unlike the majority in the intensity of incommunicable personal feelings. This sense of being "if beside ourselves, beside ourselves to God," must differentiate one human being from the usual run in a manner that they of course can have no conception of. . . . For me the curtain has never been withdrawn. I suppose I am not imaginative. But I have loved, I do love. Time does not change one feeling connected with the one out of sight, who called out in me a new nature and filled it. This morning I was reading one of his manuscript books, with all the old yearning for the perfect companionship the voice, the smile, my incommunicable experience of fulness of joy! It will be ten years in March since I have been alone.

I am much interested in the effort you are making to rescue young girls, and can well believe time and thought are completely filled up, and that mere letter-writing becomes wearisome. If only the fresh tide of young lives could be prevented from flowing in to fill the place the rescued ones have left empty! For this we must be content to wait, and trust to heredity and progress. Meanwhile, what a joy to work as you are working - the work of the present, which is preparing I must believe a better future. I wonder if the industrial hamlet will be found practicable. I should have more hope from detached homes, where there is the public opinion of a varied society to live up to. How the "Power that worketh in us" is leading men and women ever more and more to grapple with misery, and vice which is the worst misery. I am struck with the increase of philanthropic effort everywhere.

Whatever religious views are held, all seem at work in some good cause. It has indeed become one may say a fashion, and has its absurd developments, but still what progress this fact marks. I have been away from Patterdale for a month, in London and elsewhere. I was in Westminster Abbey when a tribute of loving reverence was paid to your noble president. The funeral sermon (how I dislike the words!) was worthy of its theme. The grand old Abbey was filled with silent, breathless crowds, who poured slowly forth, to the sound of Handel's and Beethoven's wailing, exulting dead marches. How intense a feeling of love and grief has been fusing our nationalities into one! I shall soon be moving to Edinburgh, and if during the winter an impulse comes to tell me of the progress of your undertaking, the old address, 11 Thistle Street, will always find me. You ask if I can read your writing. Yes, always, and I think you will admit that I have written legibly this time. You are still, are you not, in the charming house of which you sent me the photograph? It was a detached house, and you talk of a new name to your street, which puzzles me. I wonder whether Mrs. Loomis keeps up her music, and should like to hear more of her and the dear daughters than I ever shall. I head my letter by a graceful wood-flower-I will not say weed.

To Mr.

PATTERDALE, SUNDAY, Nov. 6, 1881.

How welcome your letter was, dear friend strangely welcome when one remembers that this time last year we did not know of the existence of each other. I began to fear you had not got my letter, sometimes feared I had said a something that jarred-quite unreasonably, for had sent me papers, but it is a vice of my nature to distrust myself and think I may have said or done or written something that chilled or pained. This is not humility I know, but I suppose a sort of morbid timidity. I

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told you, I think, I was but a poor weak creature, and therefore adored the stronger, finer organizations, in which some indwelling grace casts out fear. I am now alone, and all this Sunday has been spent in the past, arranging old letters, which led to reading them, and making arrangements for my approaching departure. These periodical flittings are rehearsals for the greater change which cannot be very distant and which is frequently in my mind of late. The declining health of an only sister, and the valetudinarian apprehensions of an only brother, and certain pains of my own, lead me to think we shall not any of us live to be really old, as our dear parents did.1 I am sure I hardly know why this should have run out of my pen― a disagreeable, scratching, whining steel pen — my gold pen, unluckily broken, never would have got on such dull topics. However, one result of the arrangement of old letters is that I send you two of George Eliot's, taken somewhat at random, but showing two phases of life. Pray do not show them to any one (I make exception in favour of Mrs.), and return them to me. I have no definite clue to her second marriage. But she was alone, as genius must necessarily be. In a later note she tells me that "constant female society would be intolerable to her;" and I suppose she needed to be loved, needed it imperiously, for those who saw her during the last few months of her life spoke of her as very happy. No doubt the convictions of her mind had much to do with it. To some of us the other self is living, though under conditions we do not seek to define living in some sense more intensely than ever, since the object of an ever growing love. That must make an immeasurable difference; but also, I suppose, loving is the great essential to some human beings, being loved to others. Mr. Cross had long worshipped her genius, and when she was ill, the autumn before her death, she wrote of "having 1 Within six months the three had passed away.