As I write I am seated in that little octagonal room overlooking the quarry, with its green lining of trees, and its deep central well.  It is my study now.  My wife is not yet too old to prefer the little room in which she thought and suffered so much, to every other, although the stair that leads to it is high and steep.  Nor do I object to her preference because there is no ready way to reach it save through this:  I see her the oftener.  And although I do not like any one to look over my shoulder while I write—­it disconcerts me somehow—­yet the moment the sheet is finished and flung on the heap, it is her property, as the print, reader, is yours.  I hear her step overhead now.  She is opening her window.  Now I hear her door close; and now her foot is on the stair.

“Come in, love.  I have just finished another sheet.  There it is.  What shall I end the book with?  What shall I tell the friends with whom I have been conversing so often and so long for the last thing ere for a little while I bid them good-bye?”

And Ethelwyn bends her smooth forehead—­for she has a smooth forehead still, although the hair that crowns it is almost white—­over the last few sheets; and while she reads, I will tell those who will read, one of the good things that come of being married.  It is, that there is one face upon which the changes come without your seeing them; or rather, there is one face which you can still see the same through all the shadows which years have gathered and heaped upon it.  No, stay; I have got a better way of putting it still:  there is one face whose final beauty you can see the mere clearly as the bloom of youth departs, and the loveliness of wisdom and the beauty of holiness take its place; for in it you behold all that you loved before, veiled, it is true, but glowing with gathered brilliance under the veil ("Stop one moment, my dear”) from which it will one day shine out like the moon from under a cloud, when a stream of the upper air floats it from off her face.

“Now, Ethelwyn, I am ready.  What shall I write about next?”

“I don’t think you have told them anywhere about Tom.”

“No more I have.  I meant to do so.  But I am ashamed of it.”

“The more reason to tell it.”

“You are quite right.  I will go on with it at once.  But you must not stand there behind me.  When I was a child, I could always confess best when I hid my face with my hands.”

“Besides,” said Ethelwyn, without seeming to hear what I said, “I do not want to have people saying that the vicar has made himself out so good that nobody can believe in him.”

“That would be a great fault in my book, Ethelwyn.  What does it come from in me?  Let me see.  I do not think I want to appear better than I am; but it sounds hypocritical to make merely general confessions, and it is indecorous to make particular ones.  Besides, I doubt if it is good to write much about bad things even in the way of confession—–­”