s; but Barbara is
dumb.

"You have been away such a short time!" I cry, piteously. "You cannot
have gone far! Barbara! Barbara! I _must_ get to you! If _I_ had died,
and _you_ had lived, a hundred thousand devils should not have kept me
from you. I should have broken through them all and reached you. Ah!
cruel Barbara! you do not _want_ to come to me!"

I stop, suffocated with tears; and through the pane the high stars still
shine, and Barbara is dumb!

CHAPTER LI.

"The last touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by day
and by night.
Their last step on the stairs, at the door, still throbs through
me, if ever so light.
Their last gift which they left to my childhood, far off in the
long-ago years,
Is now turned from a toy to a relic, and seen through the crystals
of tears.
'Dig the snow,' she said,
'For my church-yard bed;
Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze,
If one only of these, my beloveds, shall love with heart-warm tears,
As I have loved these.'"

It seems to me in these days as if, but for the servants, I were quite
alone in the house. Father is ill. We always thought that he never would
care about any thing, or any of us, but we are wrong. Barbara's death
has shaken him very much. Mother is with him always, nursing him, and
being at his beck and call, and I see nothing of her.

Tou Tou has gone to school, and so it comes to pass that, in the late
populous school-room, I sit alone. Where formerly one could hardly make
one's voice heard for the merry clamor, there is now no noise, but the
faint buzzing of the house-flies on the pane, and now and again, as it
grows toward sunset, the loud wintry winds keening and calling.

The Brat indeed runs over for a couple of days, but I am so glad when
they are over, and he is gone. I used to like the Brat the best of all
the boys, and perhaps by-and-by I shall again; but, for the moment, do
you know, I almost hate him.

Once or twice I _quite_ hate him, when I hear him laughing in his old
thorough, light-hearted way--when I hear him jumping up-stairs three
steps at a time, whistling the same tune he used to whistle before he
went.

Poor boy! He would be always sorrowful if he could, and is very much
ashamed of himself for not being, but he cannot.

Life is still pleasant to him, though Barbara is dead, and so I unjustly
hate him, and am glad when he is gone. Have not I co