nder neck drooped, pensively gazing
at the low fire.

"Do you know," she says, with a half-confused smile, that is also tinged
with a little anxiety, "I have been thinking--it is the first time for
three months that he has not been here at all, either in the morning,
the afternoon, or the evening!"

"Is it?" say I, slightly shivering.

"I think," she says, with a rather embarrassed laugh, "that he must have
heard _you_ were out, and that that was why he did not come. You know I
always tell you that he likes you best."

She says it, as a joke, and yet her great eyes are looking at me with a
sort of wistfulness, but neither to _them_ nor to her words can I make
any answer.

CHAPTER XXXII.

Next morning I am sitting before my looking-glass--never to me a
pleasant article of furniture--having my hair dressed. I am hardly awake
yet, and have not quite finished disentangling the real live
disagreeables which I have to face, from the imaginary ones from which
my waking has freed me. At least, in real life, I am not perpetually
pursued, through dull abysses, by a man in a crape mask, from whom I am
madly struggling to escape, and who is perpetually on the point of
overtaking and seizing me.

It was a mistake going to sleep at all last night. It would have been
far wiser and better to have kept awake. The _real_ evils are bad
enough, but the dream ones in their vivid life make me shiver even now,
though the morning sun is lying in companionable patches on the floor,
and the birds are loudly talking all together. Do _no_ birds ever
listen?

Distracted for a moment from my own miseries, by the noise of their soft
yet sharp hubbub, I am thinking this, when a knock comes at the door,
and the next moment Barbara enters. Her blond hair is tumbled about her
shoulders; no white rose's cheeks are paler than hers; in her hand she
has a note. In a moment I have dismissed the maid, and we are alone.

"I want you to read this!" she says, in an even and monotonous voice,
from which, by an effort whose greatness I can dimly guess, she keeps
all sound of trembling.

I have risen and turned from the glass; but now my knees shake under me
so much that I have to sit down again. She comes behind me, so that I
may no longer see her: and putting her arms round my neck, and hiding
her face in my unfinished hair, says, whisperingly:

"Do not fret about it, Nancy!--I do not mind much."

Then she breaks into quiet tears.

"Do yo