The more he tried to undo the impression he had made on me, the less I was able to forget it. It was a small seed of doubt that, sown unawares, was to live and come up after many days. Try as I would in after times I could not root it out. There it was, too shadowy to be met and fought with outright, too real to be disregarded.
I can scarcely tell what feeling prompted me to tell Hildred. It seemed right to do so. But she scarcely took it in.
'Killed or missing, it's about the same,' my father told her, and Hildred's eyes, raised with a look of eagerness, sank again listlessly. 'I suppose it is,' she said sighing.
I said no more then. It was better for her that the wearing suspense should be at an end. And after all, was there any real ground of hope? I believed, though I could not feel, that Cuthbert was dead.
'If only I had seen him, to say good-bye,' Hildred said, 'I think I could bear it better. I wish he were buried in the churchyard, where we could go and see his grave.'
Ah! I wished so too. That silent darkening down of fear had been very dreadful, but the fitful glimmer that was most likely false, but that would gleam out now and again, from among the ashes of our dead hopes, was to my mind more dreadful still.
These were the thoughts of many months.
I find that it is not easy to tell one's story. You may mean to tell it all, yet you find that the greater part you have left out altogether.
For so many things go to the making up of a man's life. It is not all sweet nor all bitter. There is in it much brightness, and more shadow, and a great deal besides that is neither cloud nor sunshine, neither bitterness nor sweetness, which fills up the measure of each passing day. One wave does not make a river—rather many; some dance and sparkle, touched by the sunlight from above, while all the time the under-current is flowing sorrowfully on.