whatever mathematical precision—­it has been demonstrated to us that it exists not here, nor there, nor yet anywhere, we still dimly, with yearning tears and high longings, grasp at.  Barbara has always looked heavenward.  In all her mirth, God has mixed.  Now, therefore, in this grief that He has sent her—­this ignoble grief, that yet cuts the none less deeply for being ignoble, and excluding the solace of human sympathy, she but thrusts her hand with a fuller confidence in his, and fixes her sweet eyes with a more reverent surety on the one prime consoler of humankind, who, from his Cross, has looked royally down the toiling centuries—­the king, whom this generation, above all generations, is laboring—­and, as not a few think, successfully—­to discrown.  To her, his kingship is as unquestioned as when heretics and paynims burnt to prove it.

Often, since then, in those vain longings that come to each of us, I suppose, I tried in after-days—­sometimes I try now, to stretch my arms out wide-backward toward the past—­to speak the words that would have been as easily spoken then as any other—­that no earthly power can ever make spoken words now, of sympathy and appreciation to Barbara.

I did say loving things, but they seem to me now to have been but scant and shabby.  Why did not I say a great many more?  Oh, all of you who live with those that are dearer to you than they seem, tell them every day how much you love them! at the risk of wearying them, tell them, I pray you:  it will save you, perhaps, many after-pangs.

I think that, at this time, there are in me two Nancys—­Barbara’s Nancy, and Roger’s Nancy; the one so vexed, thwarted, and humiliated in spirit, that she feels as if she never could laugh quite heartily again; the other, so utterly and triumphantly glad, that any future tears or trials seem to her in the highest degree improbable.  And Barbara herself is on the side of this latter.  From her hopeful speech and her smiles, you would think that some good news had come to her—­that she was on the eve of some long-looked-for, yet hardly-hoped prosperity.  Not that she is unnaturally or hysterically lively—­an error into which many, making such an effort and struggle for self-conquest, would fall.  Barbara’s mirth was never noisy, as mine and the boys’ so often was.  Perhaps—­nay, I have often thought since, certainly—­she weeps as she prays, in secret; but God is the only One who knows of her tears, as of her prayers.  She has always been one to go halves in her pleasures, but of her sorrows she will give never a morsel to any one.

Her very quietness under her trouble—­her silence under it—­her equanimity—­mislead me.  It is the impulse of any hurt thing to cry out.  I, myself, have always done it.  Half unconsciously, I am led by this reasoning to think that Barbara’s wound cannot be very deep, else would she shrink and writhe beneath it.  So I talk to her all day, with merciless length, about Roger.  I go through all the old queries.  I again critically examine my face, and arrive—­not only at the former conclusion, that one side is worse-looking than the other, but also that it looks ten years older.