“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.