CHAPTER L.

"So mayst thou die, as I do; fear and painBeing subdued. Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!"

All right! Yes, for Barbara itisall right. Friends, I no more doubt that than I doubt that I am sitting here now, with the hot tears on my cheeks, telling you about it; but oh! not—notfor us!

"Much laughing will end in much crying." The Brat was right. God knows the old saw has come true enough in my case. I exulted too soon. Too soon I said that the all-victor was vanquished. He might have left us our one little victory, might not he?—knowing that at best it was but a reprieve, that soon or late—soon or late, Algy—we all, every human flower that ever blossomed out in this world's sad garden, must be embraced in the icy iron of his arms.

I always said that we were too many and too prosperous; long ago I said it. I always wondered that he had so long overlooked us. And now that he comes, he takes our choicest and best. With nothing less is he content. Barbara sickens. Not until the need for her tender nursing is ended, not until Algy can do without her, does she go; and then she makes haste to leave us.

On the morning after my mad and premature elation, it is but too plain that the fever has laid hold of her too, and in its parching, withering clasp, our unstained lily fades. We take her back to Tempest at her wish, and there she dies—yes,dies.

Somehow, I never thought of Barbara dying. Often I have been nervous about the boys; out in the world, exposed to a hundred dangers and rough accidents, but about Barbara—never, hardly more than about myself, safely at home, scarcely within reach of any probable peril. And now the boys are all alive and safe, and Barbara is going. One would think that she had cared nothing for us, she is in such a hurry to be gone; and yet we all know that she has loved us well—that she loves us still—none better.

Alas! we have no long and tedious nursing of her. She has never given any trouble in her life, and she gives none now. Almost before we realize the reality and severity of her sickness, she is gone. Neither does she make any struggle. She never was one to strive or cry; never loud, clamorous, and self-asserting, like the boys and me; she was always most meek, and with a great meekness she now goes forth from among us—meekness and yet valor, for with a full and collected consciousness she looks in the face of Him from whom the nations shuddering turn away their eyes, and puts her slight hand gently into his, saying, "Friend, I am ready!"

And the days roll by;butfew,butfew of them, for, as I tell you, she goes most quickly, and it comes to pass that our Barbara's death-day dawns. Most people go in the morning. God grant that it is a good omen, that for them, indeed, the sun is rising!

We are all round her—all we that loved her and yet so lightly—for every trivial thing called upon her, and taxed her, and claimed this and that of her, as if she were some certain common thing that we should always have within our reach. Yes, we are all about her, kneeling and standing in a hallowed silence, choking back our tears that they may not stain the serenity of her departure.

Musgrave is nearest her; her hand is clasped in his; even at this sacred and supreme moment a pang of most bitter earthly jealousy contracts my heart that it should be so. What is he to her? what has he to do with our Barbara?—ours, not his, not his!But it pleases her.

Shehas never doubted him. Never has the faintest suspicion of his truth dimmed the mirror of her guileless mind, nor will it ever now. She goes down to the grave smiling, holding his hand, and kissing it. Now and then she wanders a little, but there is nothing painful or uneasy in her wanderings.

Her fair white body lies upon the bed, but by the smile that kindles all the dying loveliness of her face, by the happy broken words that fall from her sweet mouth, we know that she is already away in heaven. Now and again her lips part as if to laugh—a laugh of pure pleasantness.

"As the man lives, so shall he die!" As Barbara has lived, so does she die—meekly, unselfishly—with a great patience, and an absolute peace. O wise man! O philosophers! who would take from us—who have all but taken from us—our Blessed Land, the land over whose borders our Barbara, at that smile, seems setting her feet—youmaybe right—I, for one, know not! I am weary of your pros and cons! But when you take it away, for God's sake give us something better instead!

Who, while they kneel, with the faint hand of their life's life in theirs, can be satisfied with theprobabilityof meeting again? God! God! give uscertainty.

The night has all but waned, the dawn has come. God has sent his messenger for Barbara. An awful hunger to hear her voice once more seizes me,mastersme. I rise from my knees, and lean over her.

"Barbara!" I say, in a strangling agony of tears, "you are notafraid, are you?"

Afraid!She has all but forgotten our speech—she, who is hovering on the confines of that other world, where our speech is needed not, but she just repeats my word, "Afraid!"

Her voice is but a whisper now, but in all her look there is such an utter, tender, joyful disdain, as leaves no room for misgiving.

Nay, friends, our Barbara is not at all afraid. She never was reckoned one of the bravest of us—never—timorous rather! Often we have laughed at her easy fears, we bolder ones. But which of us, I pray you, could go with such valiant cheer to meet the one prime terror of the nations as she is doing?

And it comes to pass that, about the time of the sun-rising, Barbara goes.

"She is gone! God bless her!" Roger says, with low and reverent tenderness, stooping over our dead lily, and, putting his arm round me, tries to lead me away. But I shake him off, and laugh out loud.

"Are youmad?" I cry, "she isnotdead! She is no more dead thanyouare! Only a moment ago, she was speaking to me! Do dead people speak?"

But rave and cry as I may, sheisdead. In smiling and sweetly speaking, even while yet I said "She is here!" yea, in that very moment she went.

Our Barbara is asleep!—to awake—when?—where?—we know not, only we altogether hope, that, when next she opens her blue eyes, it will be in the sunshine of God's august smile—God, through life and in death,her friend.

"Then, breaking into tears, 'Dear God,' she cried, 'and must we see,All blissful things depart from us, or e'er we go to Thee;We cannot guess Thee in the wood, or hear Thee in the wind:Our cedars must fall round us e'er we see the light behind.Ay, sooth, we feel too strong in weal to need Thee on that road;But, woe being come, the soul is dumb that crieth not on God.'"

I am twenty years old now, barely twenty; and seventy is the appointed boundary of man's date, often exceeded by ten, by fifteen years. During all these fifty—perhaps sixty—years, I shall have to do without Barbara. I have not yet arrived at thepainof this thought:thatwill come, quick enough, I suppose, by-and-by!—it is theastonishmentof it that is making my mind reel and stagger!

I suppose there are few that have not endured and overlived the frightfulnoveltyof this idea.

I am sitting in a stupid silence; my stiff eyes—dry now, but dim and sunk with hours of frantic weeping—fixed on vacancy, while I try to thinkexactlyof her face, with a greedy, jealous fear lest, in the long apathy of the endless years ahead of me, one soft line, one lovely line, may become faint and hazy to me.

How often I have sat for hours in the same room with her, without one glance at her! It seems to me, now,monstrous, incredible, that I should ever have moved my eyes from her—that I should ever have ceased kissing her, and telling her how altogether beloved she was by me.

If all of us, while we are alive, could stealthily, once a year, and during a moment long enough to exchange but two words with them, behold those loved ones whom we have lost, death would be no more death.

But, O friends, that one moment, for whose sake we could so joyfully live through all the other minutes of the year, to us never comes.

I suppose trouble has made me a little light-headed. I think to-day I am foolisher than usual. Thoughts that would not tease other people, tease me.

If I ever see her again—if God ever give me that great felicity—I do not quite know why He should, but if—if—(ah! what an if it is!)—my mind misgives me—I have my doubts that it will not bequiteBarbara—not the Barbara that knitted socks for the boys, and taught Tou Tou, and whose slight, fond arms I can—now that I have shut my eyes—so plainly feel thrown round my shoulders, to console me when I have broken into easy tears at some silly tiff with the others. Can even the omnipotent God remember all the unnumbered dead, and restore to them the shape and features that they once wore, and by which they who loved them knew them?

The funeral is over now—over two days ago. She lies in Tempest church-yard, at her own wish. The blinds are drawn up again; the sun looks in; and life goes on as before.

Already there has grown a sacredness about the name of Barbara—the name that used to echo through the house oftener than any other, as one and another called for her. Now, it is less lightly named than the names of us live ones.

I shall alwayswincewhen I hear it. Thank God! it is not a common name. After a while, I know that she will become a sealed subject, never named; but as yet—while my wound is in its first awful rawness, I must speak of her to some one.

I am talking of her to Roger now; Roger is very good to me—very! I do not seem to care much about him, nor about anybody for the matter of that, but he is very good.

"You liked her," I say, in a perfectly collected, tearless voice, "did not you? You were very kind and forbearing to them all, always—I am very grateful to you for it—but you likedherof your own accord—you would have liked her, even if she had not been one of us, would not you?"

I seem greedy to hear that she was dear to everybody.

"I was very fond of her," he answers, in a choked voice.

"And you aresurethat she is happy now?" say I, with the same keen agony of anxiety with which I have put the question twenty times before—"well off—better than she was here—you do not say so to comfort me, I suppose; you would say it even if I were talking—not of her—but of some one like her that I did not care about?"

He turns to me, and clasps my dry, hot hands.

"Child!" he says, looking at me with great tears standing in his gray eyes—"I would stake all my hopes of seeing His face myself, that she has gone to God!"

I look at him with a sort of wistful envy. How is it that he and Barbara have attained such a certainty of faith? He canknowno more than I do. After a pause—

"I think," say I, "that I should like to go home for a bit, if you do not mind. Everybody was fond of her there. Nobody knew any thing about her, nobody cared for her here."

So I go home. As I turn in at the park-gates, in the gray, wet gloom of the November evening, I think of my first home-coming after my wedding-tour.

Again I see the divine and jocund serenity of the summer evening—the hot, red sunset making all the windows one great flame, and they all, Barbara, Algy, Bobby, Tou Tou, laughing welcome to me from the opened gate. To-night I feel as if they werealldead.

I reach the house. I stand in the empty school-room!—I, alone, of all the noisy six. The stains of our cookery still discolor the old carpet; there is still the great ink-splash on the wall, that marks the spot where the little inkstand, aimed by Bobby at my head, and dodged by me, alighted.

How little I thought that those stains and that splash would ever speak to me with voices of such pathos! I have asked to be allowed to sleep in Barbara's and my old room. I am there now. I have thrown myself on Barbara's little white bed, and am clasping her pillow in my empty arms. Then, with blurred sight and swimming eyes, I look round at all our little childish knick-knacks.

There is the white crockery lamb that she gave me the day I was six years old! Poor little trumpery lamb! I snatch it up, and deluge its crinkly back, and its little pink nose, with my scalding tears.

At night I cannot sleep. I have pulled aside the curtains, that through the windows my eyes may see the high stars, beyond which she has gone. Through the pane they make a faint and ghostly glimmer on the empty bed.

I sit up in the dead middle of the night, when the darkness and so-called silence are surging and singing round me, while the whole room feels full of spirit presences.I alone!I am accompanied by a host—a bodiless host.

I stretch out my arms before me, and cry out:

"Barbara! Barbara! If you are here, make some sign! Icommandyou, touch me, speak to me! I shall not be afraid!—dead or alive, can I be afraid ofyou?—give me some sign to let me know where you are—whether it is worth while trying to be good to get to you! Iadjureyou, give me some sign!"

The tears are raining down my cheeks, as I eagerly await some answer. Perhaps it will come in the cold,coldair, by which some have known of the presence of their dead; but in vain. The darkness and the silence surge round me. Still, still I feel the spirit-presences; but Barbara is dumb.

"You have been away such a short time!" I cry, piteously. "You cannot have gone far! Barbara! Barbara! Imustget to you! IfIhad died, andyouhad lived, a hundred thousand devils should not have kept me from you. I should have broken through them all and reached you. Ah! cruel Barbara! you do notwantto come to me!"

I stop, suffocated with tears; and through the pane the high stars still shine, and Barbara is dumb!

"The last touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by dayand by night.Their last step on the stairs, at the door, still throbs throughme, if ever so light.Their last gift which they left to my childhood, far off in thelong-ago years,Is now turned from a toy to a relic, and seen through the crystalsof tears.'Dig the snow,' she said,'For my church-yard bed;Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze,If one only of these, my beloveds, shall love with heart-warm tears,As I have loved these.'"

It seems to me in these days as if, but for the servants, I were quite alone in the house. Father is ill. We always thought that he never would care about any thing, or any of us, but we are wrong. Barbara's death has shaken him very much. Mother is with him always, nursing him, and being at his beck and call, and I see nothing of her.

Tou Tou has gone to school, and so it comes to pass that, in the late populous school-room, I sit alone. Where formerly one could hardly make one's voice heard for the merry clamor, there is now no noise, but the faint buzzing of the house-flies on the pane, and now and again, as it grows toward sunset, the loud wintry winds keening and calling.

The Brat indeed runs over for a couple of days, but I am so glad when they are over, and he is gone. I used to like the Brat the best of all the boys, and perhaps by-and-by I shall again; but, for the moment, do you know, I almost hate him.

Once or twice Iquitehate him, when I hear him laughing in his old thorough, light-hearted way—when I hear him jumping up-stairs three steps at a time, whistling the same tune he used to whistle before he went.

Poor boy! He would be always sorrowful if he could, and is very much ashamed of himself for not being, but he cannot.

Life is still pleasant to him, though Barbara is dead, and so I unjustly hate him, and am glad when he is gone. Have not I come home because here she was loved, here, at least, through all the village—the village about which she trod like one of God's kind angels—I shall be certain of meeting a keen and assured sympathy in my sorrow.

"... Where indeedThe roof so lowly but that beam of heavenDawned some time through the door-way?"

And yet, now that I am here, the village seems much as it was. Still the same groups of fat, frolicking children about the doors; still the same busy women at the wash-tub; about the house still the same coarse laughs.

It would be most unnatural, impossible that it should not be so, and yet I feel angry—sorely angry with them.

One day when this sense of rawness is at its worst and sharpest, I resolve that I will pay a visit to the almshouse. There, at least, I shall find that she is remembered; there, out of mere selfishness, they must grieve for her. When will they, in their unlovely eld, ever find such a friend again?

So I go there. I find the old women, some crooning over the fire, half asleep, some squabbling. I suppose they are glad to see me, though notsoglad when they discover that I have brought no gift in my hand, for indeed I have forgotten—no quarter-pounds of tea—no little three-cornered parcels of sugar.

They begin to talk about Barbara at once. Among the poor there is never any sacredness about the names of the dead, and though I have hungered for sorrowful talk about her, for assurance that by some one besides myself the awful emptiness of her place is felt, yet I wince and shrink from hearing her lightly named in common speech.

They are sorry about her, certainly—quite sorry—but it is more what they have lost by her, than her that they deplore. And they are more taken up with their own little miserable squabbles—with detracting tales of one another—than with either.

"Eh? she's a bad 'un, she is! I says to her, says I, 'Sally,' says I, 'if you'll give yourself hully and whully to the Lord for one week, I'll give you ahounceof baccy,' and she's that wicked, she actilly would not."

Isthisthe sort of thing I have come to hear? I rise up hastily, and take my leave.

As I walk home again through the wintry roads, and my eyes fix themselves with a tired languor on the green ivy-flowers—on the little gray-green lichen-cups on the almshouse-wall, I think, "Doesno oneremember her? Is she already altogether forgotten?"

It is still early in the afternoon when I reach home. The dark iscomingindeed, for it comes soon nowadays, but it has not yet come.

I go into the garden, and begin to pace up and down the gravel walks, under the naked lime-trees that have forgotten their July perfume, and are tossing their bare, cold arms in the evening wind.

Onlyoneof my old playfellows is left me. Jacky still stands on the gravel as if the whole place belonged to him; still stands with his head on one side, roguishly eying the sunset.

Thank Heaven, Jacky is still here, sly and nefarious, as when I bent down to give him my tearful good-by kiss on my wedding-morning. I kneel down, half laughing, half crying, on the damp walk, to stroke his round gray head, and hear his dear cross croak. Whether he resents the blackness of my appearance as being a mean imitation of his own, I do not know, but he will not come near me; he hops stiffly away, and stands eying me from the grass, with an unworthy affectation of not knowing who I am. I am still wasting useless blandishments on him, when my attention is distracted by the sound of footsteps on the walk.

I look up. Who is this man that is coming, stepping toward me in the gloaming?

I am not long left in doubt. With a slight and sudden emotion of surprised distaste, I see that it is Musgrave. I rise quickly to my feet.

"It is you, is it?" I say, with a cold ungraciousness, for I have not half forgiven him yet—still I bear a grudge against him—still I feel an angry envy that Barbara died with her hand in his.

"Yes, it is I!"

He is dressed in deep mourning. His cheeks are hollow and pale; he looks dejected, and yet fierce. We walk alongside of each other in silence for a few yards.

"Why do not you ask what has brought me here?" he asks suddenly, with a harsh abruptness. "I know that that is what you are thinking of."

"Yes," I reply, gravely, without looking at him, "it is!—what has?"

"I have come to bid you all good-by," he answers, in a low, quick voice, with his eyes bent on the ground; "you know"—raising them, and beginning to laugh hoarsely—"if—if—things had gone right—you would have been my nearest relation by now."

I shudder.

"Yes," say I, "I know."

"I am going away," he goes on, raising his voice to a louder tone of reckless unrest, "where?—God knows!—Ido not, and do not care either!—going away for good!—I am going to let the abbey."

"Toletit!"

"You areglad!" he cries in a tone of passionate and sombre resentment, while his great eyes, lifted, flash a miserable resentment into mine; "Iknewyou would be! I have not given you much pleasure very often, have I?"—(still with that same harsh mirth).—"Well, it is something to have done itonce!"

I clasp my down-hanging hands loosely together. I lift my eyes to the low, dark sky.

"AmI glad?" I say, hazily. "I do not know!—I do not think I am!—I do not think I care one way or another!"

"Nancy!" he says, presently, in a tone no longer of counterfeit mirth, but of deep and serious earnestness, "I do not know why I told you just now that I had come to bid them all good-by—it was not true—you know it was not. What are they to me, or I to them, now? I came—"

"For what did you come, then?" cry I, interrupting him, pantingly, while my eyes, wide and aghast, grow to his face. What is it that he is going to say? He—from whose clasp Barbara's dead hand was freed!

"Do not look at me like that!" he cries, wildly, putting up his hands before his eyes. "It reminds me—great God! it reminds me—"

He breaks off; then goes on a little more calmly:

"You need not be afraid! Brute and blackguard as I am, I am not quite brute and blackguard enough forthat!—that would be pastevenme! I have come to ask you once again to forgive me for that—that old offense" (with a shamed red flush on the pallor of his cheeks); "I asked you once before, you may remember, and you answered"—(recalling my words with a resentful accuracy)—"that you'would not, and, by God's help, you never would'!"

"Did I?" say I, with that same hazy feeling. Those old emotions seem grown so distant and dim. "I dare say!—I did not recollect!"

"And so I have come to ask you once again," he goes on, with a heavy emphasis—"it will do me no great harm if you say 'No' again!—it will do me small good if you say 'Yes.' And yet, before I go awayforever—yes"—(with a bitter smile)—"cheer up!—forever!—I must have one more try!"

I am silent.

"You may as well forgive me!" he says, taking my cold and passive hand, and speaking with an intense though composed mournfulness. "After all, I have not done you much harm, have I?—that is no credit to me, I know. I would have done, if I could, but I could not! You may as well forgive me, may not you? God forgives!—at least"—(with a sigh of heavy and apathetic despair)—"so they say!—wouldyoube less clement than He?"

I am looking back at him, with a quiet fixedness. I no longer feel the slightest embarrassment in his presence; it no longer disquiets me, that he should hold my hand.

"Yes," say I, speaking slowly, and still with my sunk and tear-dimmed eyes calmly resting on the dull despair of his, "yes—if you wish—it is all so long ago—andsheliked you!—yes!—I forgive you!"

"Love is enough."

And so, as the days go by, the short and silent days, it comes to pass that a sort of peace falls upon my soul; born of a slow yet deep assurance that with Barbara it is well.

One can do with probabilities in prosperity, when to most of us careless ones it seems no great matter whether there be a God or no? When all the world's wheels seem to roll smoothly, as if of themselves, and one can speculate with a confused curiosity as to the nature of the great far cause that moves them; but in grief—in the destitute bareness, the famished hunger of soul, when "one is not," how one craves forcertainties! How one yearns for the solid heaven of one's childhood; the harping angels, the never-failing flowers; the pearl gates and jeweled walls of God's great shining town!

They may be gone; I know not, but at leastonecertainty remains—guaranteed to us by no outside voice, but by the low yet plain tones that each may listen to in his own heart. That, with him who is pure and just and meek, who hates a lie worse than the sharpness of death, and loves others dearer than himself, it shall be well.

Do you ask where? or when? or how? We cannot say. We know not; only we know that it shall be well.

Never, never shall I reach Barbara's clear child-faith; Barbara, to whom God was as real and certain as I; never shall I attain to the steady confidence of Roger. I can but grope dimly with outstretched hands; sometimes in the outer blackness of a moonless, starless night; sometimes, with strained eyes catching a glimpse of a glimmer in the east. I can butfeelafter God, as a plant in a dark place feels after the light.

And so the days go by, and as they do, as the first smart of my despair softens itself into a slow and reverent acquiescence in the Maker's will, my thoughts stray carefully, and heedfully back over my past life: they overleap the gulf of Barbara's death and linger long and wonderingly among the previous months.

With a dazed astonishment I recall that even then I looked upon myself as one most unprosperous, most sorrowful-hearted.

What in Heaven's name ailed me? What did I lack? My jealousy of Roger, such a living, stinging, biting thingthen; how dead it is now!

Barbara always said I was wrong; always!

As his eyes, in the patient mournfulness of their reproachful appeal, answer again in memory the shrewish violence of my accusation on the night of the ball—the last embers of my jealousy die. He does not love me as he did; of that I am still persuaded. There is now, perhaps, there always will be, a film, a shade between us.

By my peevish tears, by my mean and sidelong reproaches, by my sulky looks, I have necessarily diminished, if not quite squandered the stock of hearty, wholesome, honest love that on that April day he so diffidently laid at my feet. I have already marred and blighted a year and three-quarters of his life. I recollect how much older than me he is, how much time I have already wasted; a pang of remorse, sharp as my knife, runs through my heart; a great and mighty yearning to go back to him at once, to begin over againat once, this very minute, to begin over again—overflows and floods my whole being. Late in the day as it is—doubly unseemly and ungracious as the confession will seem now—I will tell him of that lie with which I first sullied the cleanness of our union. With my face hidden on his broad breast, so that I may not see his eyes, I will tell him—yes, I will tell him. "I will arise, and go to him, and say, 'I have sinned against Heaven and before thee.'"

So I go. I am nearing Tempest: as I reach the church-yard gate, I stop the carriage, and get out.

Barbara was always the one that, after any absence from home, I used first to run in search of. I will go and seek her now.

It is drawing toward dusk as I pass, in my long black gown, up the church-path, between the still and low-lying dead, to the quiet spot where, with the tree-boughs waving over her, with the ivy hanging the loose luxuriance of its garlands on the church-yard wall above her head, our Barbara is taking her rest.

As I near the grave, I see that I am not its only visitor. Some one, a man, is already there, leaning pensively on the railings that surround it, with his eyes fixed on the dark and winterly earth, and on the newly-planted, flagging flowers. It is Roger. As he hears my approaching steps, the swish of my draperies, he turns; and, by the serene and lifted gravity of his eyes, I see that he has been away in heaven with Barbara. He does not speak as I come near; only he opens his arms joyfully, and yet a little diffidently, too, and I fly to then.

"Roger!" I cry, passionately, with a greedy yearning for human love here—at this very spot, where so much of the love of my life lies in death's austere silence at my feet—"love me a little—ever so little! I know I am not very lovable, but you once liked me, did not you?—not nearly so much as I thought, I know, but stilla little!"

"A little!"

"I am going to begin all over again!" I go on, eagerly, speaking very quickly, with my arms clasped about his neck, "quite all over again; indeed I am! I shall be so different that you will not know me for the same person, and if—if—" (beginning to falter and stumble)—"if you still go on likingherbest, and thinking her prettier and pleasanter to talk to—well, you cannot help it, it will not be your fault—and I—I—will try not to mind!"

He has taken my hands from about his neck, and is holding them warmly, steadfastly clasped in his own.

"Child! child!" he cries, "shall Ineverundeceive you? are you still harping on that old worn-out string?"

"Isit worn out?" I ask, anxiously, staring up with my wet eyes through the deep twilight into his. "Yes, yes!" (going on quickly and impulsively), "if you say so, I will believe it—without another word I will believe it, but—" (with a sudden fall from my high tone, and lapse into curiosity)—"you know you must have liked her a good deal once—you know you were engaged to her."

"Engaged to her?"

"Well,were notyou?"

"I never was engaged to any one in my life," he answers with solemn asseveration; "odd as it may seem, I never in my life had asked any woman to marry me until I asked you. I had known Zéphine from a child; her father was the best and kindest friend ever any man had. When he was dying, he was uneasy in his mind about her, as she was not left well off, and I promised to do what I could for her—one does not lightly break such a promise, does one? I was fond of her—I would do her any good turn I could, for old sake's sake, butmarryher—beengagedto her!—"

He pauses expressively.

"Thank God! thank God!" cry I, sobbing hysterically; "it has all come right, then—Roger!—Roger!"—(burying my tear-stained face in his breast)—"I will tell younow—perhaps I shall never feel so brave again!—do not look at me—let me hide my face; I want to get it over in a hurry! Do you remember—" (sinking my voice to an indistinct and struggling whisper)—"that night that you asked me about—aboutBrindley Wood?"

"Yes, I remember."

Already, his tone has changed. His arms seem to be slackening their close hold of me.

"Do not loose me!" cry I, passionately; "hold me tight, or I cannevertell you—how could you expect me? Well, that night—you know as well as I do—Ilied."

"Youdid?"

How hard and quick he is breathing! I am glad I cannot see his face.

"Iwasthere! Ididcry! shedidsee me—"

I stop abruptly, choked by tears, by shame, by apprehension.

"Go on!" (spoken with panting shortness).

"He met me there!" I say, tremulously. "I do not know whether he did it on purpose or not, and said dreadful things! must I tell you them?" (shuddering)—"pah! it makes me sick—he said" (speaking with a reluctant hurry)—"that he loved me, and that I loved him, and that Ihatedyou, and it took me so by surprise—it was all so horrible, and so different from what I had planned, that I cried—of course I ought not, but I did—Iroared!"

There does not seem to me any thing ludicrous in this mode of expression, neither apparently does there to him.

"Well?"

"I do not think there is any thing more!" say I, slowly and timidly raising my eyes, to judge of the effect of my confession, "only that I was sodeadly, deadlyashamed; I thought it was such a shameful thing to happen to any one that I made up my mind I would never tell anybody, and I did not."

"And is thatall?" he cries, with an intense and breathless anxiety in eyes and voice, "are you sure that that isall?"

"All!" repeat I, opening my eyes very wide in astonishment; "do not you think it isenough?"

"Are you sure," he cries, taking my face in his hands, and narrowly, searchingly regarding it—"Child! child!—to-day let us have nothing—nothingbut truth—are you sure that you did not a little regret that it must be so—that you did not feel it a little hard to be forever tied to my gray hairs—my eight-and-forty years?"

"Hush!" cry I, snatching away my hands, and putting them over my ears. "I will not listen to you!—what do I care for your forty-eight years?—If you were a hundred—two hundred—what is it to me?—what do I care—I love you! I love you! I love you—O my darling, how stupid you have been not to see it all along!"

And so it comes to pass that by Barbara's grave we kiss again with tears. And now we are happy—stilly, inly happy, though I, perhaps, am never quite so boisterously gay as before the grave yawned for my Barbara; and we walk along hand-in-hand down the slopes and up the hills of life, with our eyes fixed, as far as the weakness of our human sight will let us, on the one dread, yet good God, whom through the veil of his great deeds we dimly discern. Only I wish that Roger were not nine-and-twenty years older than I!

THE END.

"Good-bye, Sweetheart!" is certainly one of the brightest and most entertaining novels that has appeared for many years. The heroine of the story, Lenore, is really an original character, drawn only as a woman could draw her, who had looked deeply into the mysterious recesses of the feminine heart. She is a creation totally beyond the scope of a man's pen, unless it were the pen of Shakespeare. Her beauty, her wilfulness, her caprice, her love, and her sorrow, are depicted with marvellous skill, and invested with an interest of which the reader never becomes weary. Miss Broughton, in this work, has made an immense advance on her other stories, clever as those are. Her sketches of scenery and of interiors, though brief, are eminently graphic, and the dialogue is always sparkling and witty. The incidents, though sometimes startling and unexpected, are very natural, and the characters and story, from the beginning to the end, strongly enchain the attention of the reader. The work has been warmly commended by the press during its publication, as a serial, inAppletons' Journal, and, in its book-form, bids fair to be decidedlyTHEnovel of the season.

From the London Examiner.

"We will not say that Mr. Julian Hawthorne has received a double portion or his father's spirit, but 'Bressant' proves that he has inherited the distinctive tone and fibre of a gift which was altogether exceptional, and moved the author of the 'Scarlet Letter' beyond the reach of imitators.

"Bressant, Sophie, and Cornelia, appear to us invested with a sort of enchantment which we should find it difficult to account for by any reference to any special passage in their story."

From the London Athenæum.

"Mr. Hawthorne's book forms a remarkable contrast, in point of power and interest, to the dreary mass of so-called romances through which the reviewer works his way. It is not our purpose to forestall the reader, by any detailed account of the story; suffice it to say that, if we can accept the preliminary difficulty of the problem, its solution, in all its steps, is most admirably worked out."

From the Pall Mall Gazette.

"So far as a man may be judged by his first work, Mr. Julian Hawthorne is endowed with a large share of his father's peculiar genius. We trace in 'Bressant' the same intense yearning after a high and spiritual life, the same passionate love of nature, the same subtlety and delicacy of remark, and also a little of the same tendency to indulge in the use of a half-weird, half-fantastic imagery."

From the New York Times.

"'Bressant' is, then, a work that demonstrates the fitness of its author to bear the name of Hawthorne. More in praise need not be said; but, if the promise of the book shall not utterly fade and vanish, Julian Hawthorne, in the maturity of his power, will rank side by side with him who has hitherto been peerless, but whom we must hereafter call the 'Elder Hawthorne.'"

From the Boston Post.

"There is beauty as well as power in this novel, the two so pleasantly blended, that the sudden and incomplete conclusion, although ending the romance with an abruptness that is itself artistic, comes only too soon for the reader."

From the Boston Globe.

"It is by far the most original novel of the season that has been published at home or abroad, and will take high rank among the best American novels ever written."

From the Boston Gazette.

"There is a strength in the book which takes it in a marked degree out or the range of ordinary works of fiction. It is substantially an original story. There are freshness and vigor in every part."

From the Home Journal.

"'Bressant' is a remarkable romance, full of those subtle touches of fancy, and that insight into the human heart, which distinguish genius from the mere clever and entertaining writers of whom we have perhaps too many."

From Gail Hamilton, author of "Gala Days," etc.

"'The Household of Bouverie' is one of those nuisances of books that pluck out all your teeth, and then dare you to bite them. Your interest is awakened in the first chapter, and you are whirled through in a lightning-express train that leaves you no opportunity to look at the little details of wood, and lawn, and river. You notice two or three little peculiarities of style—one or two 'bits' of painting—and then you pull on your seven-leagued boots, and away you go."

From John G. Saxe, the Poet.

"It is a strange romance, and will bother the critics not a little. The interest of the book is undeniable, and is wonderfully sustained to the end of the story. I think it exhibits far more power than any lady-novel of recent date, and it certainly has the rare merit of entire originality."

From Marion Harland, author of "Alone," "Hidden Path," etc.

"As to Mrs. Warfield's wonderful book, I have read it twice—the second time more carefully than the first—and I use the term 'wonderful' because it best expresses the feeling uppermost in my mind, both while reading and thinking it over. As a piece of imaginative writing, I have seen nothing to equal it since the days of Edgar A. Poe, and I doubt whether he could have sustained himself and reader through a book of half the size of the 'Household of Bouverie.' I was literally hurried through it by my intense sympathy, my devouring curiosity—it was more than interest. I read everywhere—between the courses of the hotel-table, on the boat, in the cars—until I had swallowed the last line. This is no common occurrence with a veteran romance-reader like myself."

From George Ripley's Review of "The Household of Bouverie," in Harper's Magazine, November, 1860.

"Everywhere betraying a daring boldness of conception, singular fertility of illustration, and a combined beauty and vigor of expression, which it would be difficult to match in any recent works of fiction. In these days, when the most milk-and-watery platitudes are so often welcomed as sibylline inspirations, it is somewhat refreshing to meet with a female novel-writer who displays the unmistakable fire of genius, however terrific its brightness."

TheN. Y. Evening Postsays of "Miriam Monfort:" "Mrs. Warfield's new novel has freshness, and is so far removed from mediocrity as to entitle it to respectful comment. Her fiction calls for study. Her perception is deep and artistic, as respects both the dramatic side of life and the beautiful. It is not strictly nature, in the general sense, that forms the basis of her descriptions. She finds something deeper and more mystic than nature in the sense in which the term is usually used by critics, in the answer of the soul to life—in the strange, weird, and lonesome music (though now and then broken by discords) of the still small voices with which human nature replies to the questions that sorely vex her. She has the analytic capacity in the field of psychology, which enables her to trace phenomena in a story without arguing about them, and to exhibit the dramatic side of them without stopping to explain the reasons for it. In a word, her hand is as sure as that of a master, and if there were more such novels as this simple semi-biographical story of Miriam Monfort, it would not be necessary so often to put the question, 'Is the art of fiction extinct?'"

TheCincinnati Daily Gazettesays: "'Miriam Monfort,' which now lies before us, is less sensational in incident than its predecessor, though it does not lack stirring events—an experience on a burning ship, for example. Its interest lies in the intensity which marks all the characters good and bad. The plot turns on the treachery of a pretended lover, and the author seems to have experienced every emotion of love and hate, jealousy and fear, that has inspired the creations of her pen. There is a contagion in her earnestness, and we doubt not that numerous readers will follow the fortunes of the beautiful but much-persecuted Miriam with breathless interest."

TheAll Day City Itemsays: "It is a work of extraordinary merit. The story is charmingly told by the heroine. It is admirable and original in plot, varied in incident, and intensely absorbing in interest; besides, throughout the volume, there is an exquisite combination of sensibility, pride, and loveliness, which will hold the work in high estimation. We make a quotation from the book that suits the critic exactly. 'It is splendid; it is a dream, more vivid than life itself; it is like drinking champagne, smelling tuberoses, inhaling laughing-gas, going to the opera, all at one time.' We recommend this to our young lady friends as a most thoughtfully and delightfully written novel."

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