ns, his patient
constancy, like a great ambassador, pleaded mightily in advance.

Henry Fair, gentle, strong, and true, will come; _the other_ never
comes. The explanation is very simple; she has made it to Johanna twice
within the year: a strained relation--it happens among the best of
men--between him and Rosemont's master. Besides, Mr. March, she says,
visits nowhere. He is, as Fannie herself testifies, more completely out
of all Suez's little social eddies than even the overtasked young
mistress of Rosemont, and does nothing day or night but buffet the flood
of his adversities. As she reminds herself of these things now, she
recalls Fannie's praise of his "indomitable pluck," and feels a new,
warm courage around her own heart. For as long as men can show valor,
she gravely reflects, surely women can have fortitude. How small a
right, at best--how little honest room--there is in this huge world of
strifes and sorrows for a young girl's heart to go breaking itself with
its own grief and longing.

The right thing is, of course, to forget. She should! She must! But--she
has said so every evening and morning for two years. Old man! old woman!
do you remember what two years meant when you were in the early
twenties? Even yet, with the two years gone, by hard crowding of the
hours with cares, as a ship crowds sail or steam, it seems at times as
if her forgetting were about to make headway; but just then the
unexpected happens--merely the unexpected. O why not the romantic? She
hears him praised or blamed; or, as now, he is ill; or she meets him in
a dream; or between midnight and dawn she cannot sleep; or, worst of
all, by some sad mischance she sees him, close by, in a throng or in a
public way--for an instant--and, when it is too late, knows by his
remembered look that he wanted to speak; and the flood lifts and sweeps
her back, and she must begin again. The daylight hours are the easiest;
there is so much to do and see done, and just the clear, lost,
silent-hearted mother's ways to follow. One can manage everything but
the twilights with their death of day, their hush of birds, the mind
gazing back into the past and the heart asking unanswerable questions of
the future. For the evenings there are books, though not all; especially
not Herrick, any more; nor Tennyson, for it opens of itself at
"Mariana," who wept, "I am aweary, aweary. Oh, God, that I were dead!"

Barbara walked again. Moving at a slow pace, so, one can