yours.  What I wish most earnestly for you—­it is what he, if he had lived, would have wished most—­is that you should become a nobler man—­as you can, I know; as you will, I believe.’  I could not speak, or answer him then; but I have tried to do what he begged me.  Perhaps you do not know—­I hope you do not—­what a struggle an attempt to forget is.  I could not have believed that a memory could hang so heavily round my neck.

“He wrote to me once after, and sent me Edward’s riding-whip and flask.  I never saw him again.  From what Edward told me, and from the little I saw of him myself, I knew that he was the humblest and gravest of men.  In his dealing with me, he showed himself the most truly loving.”

I was at Tredennis for a week just after this.  At the end of that time he begged me not to stay—­he could bear it better alone.  My impression was that he was like a man half dazed with grief.  He sat very silent, and would do nothing; if he ever spoke, it was with evident effort.  He did not appear to be ill, only crushed and overwhelmed.  Once he broke down.  He was looking over some books, and found a notebook of Edward’s, of some subject they had been reading together.  Edward had tired of the subject, and the last page was occupied with a pen-and-ink sketch of Arthur himself, the discovery of which, done as it had been during working hours, had been the occasion of some affectionate strictures.  He shut the book up quickly, and literally moaned.

Then, after a little, his frosty silence broke up, and he wrote me several letters about his boy, very full and detailed, with numbers of little stories, and ending with a passionate burst of grief at the loss.  They are too private for publication.

One very notable one, some six months after, must be given here.

“People talk and write about instantaneous momentary conversions—­I never realized what was meant till a week ago.  Day after day, all that time, I had been filled with gloomy, reproachful, or bitter thoughts of God and the providence which took Edward from me.  It was intolerable that he should be swept away into silence, leaving me so worn and hopeless, and, worst of all, so dissatisfied and discontented with the hand that did it—­my vaunted philosophy failing and giving out utterly.  I knew it was right, but could not feel it.

“But last night as I sat, as I have so often done, burning and racked with recollection and regret, a kind of peace stole over me.  It was quite sudden, quite abnormal; not that afterglow of hope that sometimes follows a dark plunge of despair, but a gentle firm trust that seemed, without explaining, yet to make all things plain; not ebbing and flowing, not changing with physical sensation or mental weariness, but deep, abiding, sustaining.  You may think it rash of me thus, after so short an interval, to write so assuredly of it; but even if I lost the sense (and I shall not) the memory of that moment would support me; ‘If I go down into hell, thou art there also,’ is the only sentence that expresses it.