Somehow, this silence rebuked me, and I felt I was not behaving with due respect to your chosen heir, for that is what he really is. So all day long I tried to nerve myself for what I had to do, which was to tell him I could not accept the sacrifice of himself, but that I was ready and glad to place myself in the position of his younger sister, as you had placed him in the position of an eldest—indeed, an only son. This would be very hard to say truthfully, feeling, as I do, that to be his own wife is the greatest happiness that any living woman on the face of this earth can possibly attain. When evening came, I could not face him. I felt worn out. I sent him a little note, telling him I would see him to-morrow morning (_this_ morning); and locking myself into my room, went to bed and tried to sleep. Sleep was impossible. The night was chill, I knew, though I was hot. The moonlight would not be shut out. I heard the quarters chime, the hours strike, the noises in the house cease one by one, till the last door up above shut softly, and the house had its night hush on, which, when you and I were reading together late, you used to call its “nightcap.” Only that last night that we were trying to find out something of the separate will-power, commonly called “the human soul,” you said, “We must wait till the house has put on its nightcap;” and when the hush came, you laid down your long pipe, and with that peculiar smile which meant _work_, you said, “Come along!” Then, as I lay tossing, eleven struck, and a thought came to me as a lightning flash. There is an old notion that midnight or thereabouts is the time when disembodied spirit-essence can manifest itself in some way; and, as you have often seriously said to me, there is always at least a spark of fire underlying the dense smoke of these popular fallacies. I had not tried to find you in the dead of night yet! I got up, put on a winter dressing-gown, wrapped my head in a veil, and, going softly downstairs, went out into the pinewood. There I roamed and wandered, straining my thoughts, fixing them upon you—yearning, longing for you. The moonlight streamed calmly down; the dark night sky was clear and peaceful; the pines stood solemn and still, like giant, black-clad sentinels guarding your grave. But _you_—oh, father, father!—you were _not_. Now and then an owl hooted, or one of those screeching night-birds flew out of covert. But these natural noises only deepened the stern silence of the sleeping world. My wretched body, my miserable senses, were the barrier between us. Embodied, we shall never meet again. Oh, father! that thought maddened me; I could not bear the separation any longer. I looked up. (Why do we always _look up_?) That cold, solitary eye of the night—the moon—glared banefully at me. To me its chill disdain meant: “Fool, why stand there drivelling? If you will have him again, _die_.” The thought steadied me. I would die. Yes; but how, when?