These were hard days for Isaac. He believed in work and in filling his day to the limit with productive effort, but in so doing, he had put love and family in a box that he had allowed himself to open only rarely. A mistake, he saw now. He had lost his wife and nearly lost a daughter. How completely Cora had held his world together now became apparent to him. His children needed food, warmth, a dry place, and most of all they needed him. As the city had fallen, so had the neat compartments of his life.
