make her look at me more than usual.

"Why do you not complain?" she asked me. And I told her that I had nothing
to complain of.

And to-night she told me that she had read the Scriptures
misunderstandingly all her life; that she had taken their truths to her in
affright; that their majesty had, instead of raising her up to their
height, debased her even below herself. I saw in all from the first, even
had friend Afton not told me, that what is called religion had wrecked her
mind, and in my own manner of understanding the Lord's way I could
scarcely comprehend it.

Although I had not much mind in my affairs after I had heard of Barbara's
illness, yet a week sped along before I had word again. And what word was
it that _did_ come? I have read that to hear of the death of one who is
infinitely near to us in spirit is not the worst we can hear--that the
separation by death is not so eternal as the separation which life can
make. Barbara wrote me herself this time, unknown to her father; and I had
been away but a matter of three months. She said no word of her illness
nor of her father: she addressed herself in all honesty and ruth to me.
She had, somehow, in the place met with a man, one of the world's people,
whom she found much to her mind--far more than I had ever been, she said:
her father necessarily knew nothing of this, and she had chosen rather to
tell me of it first, as I had the best right to know first of all. (The
best right! I remembered the time when I had spoken to her father before I
had spoken to her of my intended coming to this place where I was.) She
asked me would I be willing to take as a wife a woman who could not care
for me solely, carrying guiltily into her married life the memory of her
great feeling for a man who was not her husband. She asked if it were not
better that she should tell me this, rather than to hold herself tied to a
false code of honor which should make her give herself to me because she
had promised to do so. She would, if I still chose to hold her to her
word, marry me, but it was best I should know; and she trusted I would say
no word to her father about this, as it was clearly between her and me.
She further said that did I refuse to give her up she would not compromise
me in the least, as she did not know if that other man cared at all for
her; and she was sure, as I must be, that she had never shown him that he
was aught to her.

This was the letter I was to answer unkn