"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 so deadly, deadly ashamed; 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 that all?" he cries, with an intense and breathless anxiety in eyes and voice, "are you sure that that is all?"
"All!" repeat I, opening my eyes very wide in astonishment; "do not you think it is enough?"
"Are you sure," he cries, taking my face in his hands, and narrowly, searchingly regarding it—"Child! child!—to-day let us have nothing—nothing but 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.