But it is not deep grief. It troubles the surface of my mind. If I were really troubled in my heart I could not hide it from her. I have often tried many a time to keep my vexations secret and my unhappiness hid, but she finds them out, and I am glad when I am discovered. These miseries grow light when she knows what they are, and we bear them together. To-day I am vexed, but not deeply, and it is as easy to avoid her as it is difficult to keep my mind on our house and what must become of it because we cannot pay our rent. The house, happy though we were in it, seems remote and trivial. All things seem trivial save the life we live now. We have severed so many bonds, and all have proved so weak, that I scarcely think of our house and our furniture as our own any more save for Terry’s sake. If I am vexed it is chiefly because I ought to have remembered to pay our rent. I am equally vexed each time I recall things we should have brought with us. This is strange, that I should be perturbed because I have omitted to do things which would make complete our independence and our severance from our old life; for our present life is no more than a shift, a temporary escape, and all its course, and all our thoughts, should be towards its ending. But it is not so. I am wrapt in the immediate daily events. I have no desires beyond the cave that shelters us and the land that we occupy alone.

We occupy, but it is not occupied, nor ever will be occupied. It lies before me and my eyes that see it, and my feet that walk on it, mark what they see and feel upon my brain, but what they view and what they touch is not changed by them, nor aware of them. We are in the wild land, but not of it; winds and beasts and the brown cladding of moor are of it; to day and every day they go, they return, and we, who shift and go, have comfort and protection but no home. It is strange that this desolate country, heedless and aloof, should give such comfort and be a sanctuary for the mind.