sad party at Baden had drawn much nearer together in these latter
days.



CHAPTER XXXIX--A PURPOSE



'It then draws near the season
Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk.'

Hamlet.

We had really lost our Griffith long before--our bright, generous,
warm-hearted, promising Griff, the brilliance of our home; but his
actual death made the first breach in a hitherto unbroken family,
and was a new and strange shock. It made my father absolutely an
old man; and it also changed Martyn. His first contact with
responsibility, suffering, and death had demolished the light-
hearted boyishness which had lasted in the youngest of the family
through all his high aspirations. Till his return to Oxford, his
chief solace was in getting some one of us alone, going through all
the scenes at Baden, discussing his new impressions of the trials
and perplexities of life, and seeking out passages in the books that
were becoming our oracles. What he had admired externally before,
he was grasping from within; nor can I describe what the Lyra
Apostolica, and the two first volumes of Parochial Sermons preached
at Littlemore, became to us.