ning has
closed in colder. The birds have all ceased their singing, and I still
sit on, in the absolute silence, unconscious--unaware of any thing round
me; living only in my thoughts, and with a resolution growing ever
stronger and stronger within me. I will _not_ tell her! I will _never_
tell _any one_. I, that have hitherto bungled and blundered over the
whitest fib, will wade knee-deep in falsehoods, before I will ever let
any one guess the disgrace that has happened to me. Oh that, by long
silence, I could wipe it out of my own heart--out of the book of
unerasable past deeds!

Of course, by the cessation of his visits, Barbara will learn her fate
in time. _In time._ Yes! but till then--till the long weeks in their
lapse have brought the certainty of disappointment and mistake? How can
I--myself knowing--watch her gentle confidence (for latterly her
doubts--and whose would not?--have been set at rest) decline through all
the suffering stages of uneasy expectation and deferred hope, to the
blank, dull sickness of despair? How, without betraying myself, see her
daily with wistful eyes looking--with strained ears listening--for a
face and a step that come not? If she were one to love lightly, one of
the many women who, when satisfied that it is no longer any use to cry
and strive for the unattainable, the out of reach, clip and pare their
affections to fit the unattainable, the within reach--! But I know
differently.

Hitherto, whenever love has been offered to her--and the occasions have
been not few--she has put it away from her; most gently, indeed, with a
most eager desire to pour balm and not vinegar into the wounds she has
made; with a most sincere sorrow and a disproportioned remorse at being
obliged to cause pain to any living thing; yet, with a quiet and
indifferent firmness, that left small ground for lingering hopes. And
now, having once loved, she will be slow to unlove again.

It is quite dark now--as dark, at least, as it will be all night--and
two or three stars are beginning to quiver out, small and cold, in the
infinite distances of the sky. The sight of them, faintly trembling
between the bare boughs of the trees, is the first thing that calls me
back to the consciousness of outward things. Again I rise, and begin to
walk, stumbling through the long wet knots of the unseen grass, toward
the house. But when I reach it--when I see the red gleams shining
through the chinks of the window-shutters--my h