pain; "do not go on, where is the use?--I hate
anniversaries."

I stop, quenched into silence; my poor little trickle of talk
effectually dried. After a pause, he speaks.

"What has made you think of all these dead trivialities?" he asks in a
voice more moved--or I think so--less positively steady than his has
been of late; "at your age, it is more natural to look on than to look
back."

"Is it?" say I, sadly, "I do not know; I seem to have such a great deal
of time for _thinking_ now; this house is so _extraordinarily_ silent!
did you never notice it?--of course it is large, and we are only two
people in it, but at home it never seemed to me so _deadly_ quiet, even
when I was alone in the house."

"_Were_ you ever alone?" he asks, with a smile. He is thinking of the
noisy multitude that are connected in his memory with my father's
mansion; that, during all his experience of it, have filled its rooms
and passages with the hubbub of their strong-lunged jollity.

"Yes, I have been," I reply; "not often, of course! but several times,
when the boys were away, and father and mother and Barbara had gone out
to dinner; of course it seemed still and dumb, but not--" (shuddering a
little)--"not so _aggressively loudly_ silent as this does!"

He looks at me, with a sort of remorseful pain.

"It _is_ very dull for you!" he says, compassionately; "shut up in
endless duet, with a person treble your age! I ought to have thought of
that; in a month or so, we shall be going to London, _that_ will amuse
you, will not it? and till then, is there any one that you would like to
have asked here?--any friend of your own?--any companion of your own
age?"

"No," reply I, despondently, staring out of the window, "I have no
friends."

"The boys, then?" speaking with a sudden assurance of tone, as one that
has certainly hit upon a pleasant suggestion.

I shake my head.

"I could not have Bobby and the Brat, if I would, and I would not have
Algy if I could!" I reply with curt dejection.

"Barbara, then?"

Again I shake my head. Not even Barbara will I allow to witness the
failure of my dreams, the downfall of my high castles, the sterility of
my Promised Land.

"No, I will not have Barbara!" I answer; "last time that she was
here--" but I cannot finish my sentence. I break away weeping.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

"I think you hardly know the tender rhyme
Of 'Trust me not at all or all in all!'"

There are some wounds,