ment than He?"

I am looking back at him, with a quiet fixedness. I no longer feel the
slightest embarrassment in his presence; it no longer disquiets me, that
he should hold my hand.

"Yes," say I, speaking slowly, and still with my sunk and tear-dimmed
eyes calmly resting on the dull despair of his, "yes--if you wish--it is
all so long ago--and _she_ liked you!--yes!--I forgive you!"

CHAPTER LII.

"Love is enough."

And so, as the days go by, the short and silent days, it comes to pass
that a sort of peace falls upon my soul; born of a slow yet deep
assurance that with Barbara it is well.

One can do with probabilities in prosperity, when to most of us careless
ones it seems no great matter whether there be a God or no? When all the
world's wheels seem to roll smoothly, as if of themselves, and one can
speculate with a confused curiosity as to the nature of the great far
cause that moves them; but in grief--in the destitute bareness, the
famished hunger of soul, when "one is not," how one craves for
_certainties_! How one yearns for the solid heaven of one's childhood;
the harping angels, the never-failing flowers; the pearl gates and
jeweled walls of God's great shining town!

They may be gone; I know not, but at least _one_ certainty
remains--guaranteed to us by no outside voice, but by the low yet plain
tones that each may listen to in his own heart. That, with him who is
pure and just and meek, who hates a lie worse than the sharpness of
death, and loves others dearer than himself, it shall be well.

Do you ask where? or when? or how? We cannot say. We know not; only we
know that it shall be well.

Never, never shall I reach Barbara's clear child-faith; Barbara, to whom
God was as real and certain as I; never shall I attain to the steady
confidence of Roger. I can but grope dimly with outstretched hands;
sometimes in the outer blackness of a moonless, starless night;
sometimes, with strained eyes catching a glimpse of a glimmer in the
east. I can but _feel_ after God, as a plant in a dark place feels after
the light.

And so the days go by, and as they do, as the first smart of my despair
softens itself into a slow and reverent acquiescence in the Maker's
will, my thoughts stray carefully, and heedfully back over my past life:
they overleap the gulf of Barbara's death and linger long and
wonderingly among the previous months.

With a dazed astonishment I recall that even then I looked up