The next week came more letters; they had got a new idea out there.  Why should not Mrs. Ledwith and the others come and join them?  They were in Munich, now; the schools were splendid; would be just the thing for Helena; and “it was time for mamma to have a rest.”

This thought, among the dozen others, had had its turn in Mrs. Ledwith’s head.  To break away, and leave everything, that is the impulse of natures like hers when things go hard and they cannot shape them.  Only to get off; if she could do that!

Meanwhile, it was far different with Desire.

She was suffering with a deeper pain; not with a sharper loss, for she had seen so little of her father; but she looked in and back, and thought of what she ought to miss, and what had never been.

She ought to have known her father better; his life ought to have been more to her; was it her fault, or, harder yet, had it been his?  This is the sorest thrust of grief; when it is only shock, and pity, and horror, and after these go by, not grief enough!

The child wrestled with herself, as she always did, questioning, arraigning.  If she could make it all right, in the past, and now; if she could feel that all she had to do was to be tenderly sorry, and to love on through the darkness, she would not mind the dark; it would be only a phase of the life,—­the love.  But to have lived her life so far, to have had the relations of it, and yet not to have lived it, not to have been real child, real sister, not to be real stricken daughter now, tasting the suffering just as God made it to be tasted,—­was she going through all things, even this, in a vain shadow? Would not life touch her?

She went away back, strangely, and asked whether she had had any business to be born?  Whether it were a piece of God’s truth at all, that she and all of them should be, and call themselves a household,—­a home?  The depth, the beauty of it were so unfulfilled!  What was wrong, and how far back?  Living in the midst of superficialities; in the noontide of a day of shams; putting her hands forth and grasping, almost everywhere, nothing but thin, hard surface,—­she wondered how much of the world was real; how many came into the world where, and as, God meant them to come.  What it was to “climb up some other way into the sheepfold,” and to be a thief and a robber, even of life!

These were strange thoughts.  Desire Ledwith was a strange girl.

But into the midst there crept one comfort; there was one glimpse out of the darkness into the daylight.

Kenneth Kincaid came in often to see them,—­to inquire; just now he had frequent business in the city; he brought ferns and flowers, that Dorris gathered and filled into baskets, fresh and damp with moss.

Dorris was a dear friend; she dwelt in the life and the brightness; she reached forth and gathered, and turned and ministered again.  The ferns and flowers were messages; leaves out of God’s living Word, that she read, found precious, and sent on; apparitions, they seemed standing forth to sense, and making sweet, true signs from the inner realm of everlasting love and glory.