is gone! gone in the first freshness of the morning! This
year, I seem fated to witness the childhood of many summer days. The
carriage that bears him away is lost to sight--dwindled away to nothing
among the park-trees. Five minutes ago, my arms were clinging with a
tightness of a clasp that a bear might have admired round his neck. I
was too choked with tears to say much, and kept repeating with the
persistence of a guinea-fowl, but without the distinctness, "Come back!
come back!"

"Good-by, my Nancy!" he says, holding me a little from him, that he may
the better consider my face, "be quite--_quite_ happy, while I am
away--_indeed_, that will be the way to please me best, and be a little
glad to see me when I come back!"

And now he is gone; and I am left standing at the hall-door with level
hand shading my eyes from the red sun--with a smeared face--with the
butler and two footmen respectfully regarding my affliction--(_they_ do
not like to disappear, till they have shut the door--_I_ do not like to
ask them to retire, and I do not like to lose the last glimpse) so there
I remain--nineteen--a grass widow, and--ALONE! I shall not, however, be
alone for long; for this evening Barbara is coming. Algy is to bring
her, and to stay a few days on his way to Aldershott. All day long, I
wander with restless aimlessness about the house, my big house--so
empty, so orderly in its stateliness--so frightfully silent! Ah! the
doll's house whose whole front came out at once was a better
companion--much more friendly, and not half so oppressive. In almost
every room, I cry profusely--disagreeable tears of shame and remorse and
grief--only, O friends! I will tell you _now_, what I would not tell
myself then, that the grief, though true, was not so great as either of
the other feelings. I lunch in the great dining-room, with tall
full-length Tempests eying me with constant placidity from the walls;
with the butler and footman still trying respectfully to ignore my
swelled nose and bunged-up eyes.

As evening draws on--evening that is to bring some voices, some sound of
steps to me and my great dumb house--I revive a little. If it were Bobby
that were coming, my mind would be weighted by the thought of the
repression his spirits would need, but Algy's mirth is several shades
less violent, and Barbara is never jarringly joyful. So I change my
dress, bathe my face, make my maid retwist my hair, and prepare to be
chastenedly and modera