! You are a little hard upon me, dear: indeed you are--some day I
think that you will see it--but it was not your own thought! I know that
as well as if you had told me! It was suggested to you--_by whom_ you
best know, and whether his words or mine are most worthy of credit!"

He is looking at me with a fixed, pathetic mournfulness. There is in his
eyes a sort of hopelessness and yet patience.

"We are _miserable_, are not we?" he goes on, in a low voice--"_most_
miserable! and it seems to me that every day we grow more so, that every
day there is a greater dissonance between us! For my part, I have given
up the hope that we can ever be happier! I have wondered that I should
have entertained it. But, at least, we might have _peace_!"

There is such a depth of depression, such a burden of fatigue in his
voice, that the tears rise in my throat and choke the coming speech.

"At least you are undeceived about me, are not you?" he says, looking at
me with an eager and yet almost confident expectation. "At least, you
believe me!"

But I answer nothing. It is the tears that keep me dumb, but I think
that he thinks me still unconvinced, for he turns away with a groan.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

"I made a posy while the day ran by,
Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band;
But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
And withered in my hand!"

We are home again now; we have been away only three days after all, but
they seem to me like three years--three disastrous years--so greatly
during them has the gulf between Roger and me widened and deepened.
Looking back on what it was before that, it seems to me now to have been
but a shallow and trifling ditch, compared to the abyss that it is now.
We left Mr. Parker standing at the hall-door, his red hair flaming
bravely in the morning sun, loudly expressing his regret at our
departure, and trying to extract an unlikely promise from us that we
will come back next week.

During the drive home we none of us hardly speak. Roger and I are
gloomily silent, Barbara sympathetically so. Barbara has the happiest
knack of being in tune with every mood; she never jostles with untimely
mirth against any sadness. I think she sees that my wounds are yet too
fresh and raw to bear the gentlest handling, so she only pours upon them
the balm of her tender silence. There is none of the recognized and