XV. How hard I strove against this jealousy!— Would plead with Mary, and would kneel to Christ; And seek the priestly father and confess The feeling all to him. Nor would he chide One half as much as I would chide myself. How would he shame me that I dared to love “A man who had not ask’d me for my love! A man who loved my sister and not me!”— Then bid me count my beads for hours and hours A week or more I slept not, counting them; But, while my thought was fixt but on my sin, It seem’d my sin but grew. It grew in fact: For on this voyage of life, not seas alone, But skies—all things about us—mirror back The souls that they surround. With each to him That hath, is given back more of what he hath: One smiles at aught, it gives him back a smile; He frowns, it gives a frown; he looks with love, He finds love; but without love, none can find it. Alas, that men should think one secret fault Can hide itself. Their sin will find them out. Before, behind, from every quarter flash Their moods reflected. Let them tell the tale, Nay, let them whisper, glance, or shrug one hint Of what they find in earth about, and lo! In this, their tale of it, all read their own. XVI. I wander much. There came a change at last. Our charge was better; and, one afternoon, Almost before I found that he had waked, Upon my cheeks arose a burning heat, While, past a mist of tears that flow’d, there dawn’d The light that waited in his clear, blue eye. “Pauline,” he murmur’d then, “Pauline, my friend— And what?—You weep for me! I shall not die.— Nay, do not rise, nor call Doretta yet. Hist, hist!—nor let her hear us. Why is this, That you stay never with me when I wake? “You think you ‘cannot do for me’?—do what? And have I ask’d you any thing to do?— I pray you stay: do not do any thing,— What pretty cuffs!—There, there: it still shall lie, The little hand; I like to look at it.— Who said I wish’d for books, and prints, and tales, And bustlings all about?—Who told you this? Your sister?—She a good, kind nurse has been: And you, you too, have been a good, kind nurse. Think you that I have never lain awake, Nor known the long hours you have watch’d with me?— “What say?—‘Done’ but ‘your duty’?—Say not so. A friend most pleases when, forgetting due, He seems to do his pleasure; but a foe,— Who does not shrink to feel him near enough To freeze one with a chill though duteous touch? Mere duty forms the body-part of love: Let love be present, and this body seems The fitting vestment of a finer life: Let love be gone, it leaves a hideous corpse! Pauline, I crave the life, I crave the soul: Would you content me with a skeleton?