I have plenty of time to think these thoughts, for I am a great deal alone now.  Roger is out all day, hunting or with his agent, or on some of the manifold business that landed property entails, or that the settlement of Mr. Huntley’s inextricably tangled affairs involves.  Very often he does not come in till dressing-time.  I never ask him where he has been—­never!  I think that I know.

Often in these after-days, pondering on those ill times, seeing their incidents in that duer proportion that a stand-point at a little distance from them gives, it has occurred to me that sometimes I was wrong, that not seldom, while I was eating my heart out up-stairs, with dumb jealousy picturing to myself my husband in the shaded fragrance, the dulcet gloom of the drawing-room at Laurel Cottage, he was in the house with me, as much alone as I, in the dull solitude of his own room, pacing up and down the carpet, or bending over an unread book.

I will tell you why I think so.  One day—­it is the end of March now, the year is no longer a swaddled baby, it is shooting up into a tall stripling—­I have been straying about the brown gardens, alone, of course.  It is a year to-day since Bobby and I together strolled among the kitchen-stuff in the garden at home, since he served me that ill turn with the ladder.  Every thing reminds me of that day:  these might be the same crocus-clumps, as those that last year frightened away winter with their purple and gold banners.  I remember that, as I looked down their deep throats, I was humming Tou Tou’s verb, “J’aime, I love; Tu aimes, Thou lovest; Il aime, He loves.”

I sigh.  There was the same purple promise over the budded woods; the same sharpness in the bustling wind.  Since then, Nature has gone through all her plodding processes, and now it is all to do over again.  A sense of fatigue at the infinite repetitions of life comes over me.  If Nature would but make a little variation!  If the seasons would but change their places a little, and the flowers their order, so that there might be something of unexpectedness about them!  But no! they walk round and round forever in their monotonous leisure.

I am stooping to pick a little posy of violets as these languid thoughts dawdle through my mind—­blue mysteries of sweetness and color, born of the unscented, dull earth.  As I pass Roger’s door, having reentered the house, the thought strikes me to set them on his writing-table.  Most likely he will not notice them, not be aware of them:  but even so they will be able humbly to speak to him the sweet things that he will not listen to from me.  I open the door and listlessly enter.  If I had thought that there was any chance of his being within, I should not have done so without knocking; indeed, I hardly think I should have done it at all, but this seems to me most unlikely.  Nevertheless, he is.

As I enter, I catch sudden sight of him.  He is sitting in his arm-chair, his elbows leaned on the table before him, his hand passed through his ruffled hair, and his gray eyes straying abstractedly away from the neglected page before him.  I see him before he sees me.  I have time to take in all the dejection of his attitude, all its spiritless idleness.  At the slight noise my skirts make, he looks up.  I stop on the threshold.