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 unknown to her father. I saw her honor standing out white and unassailable in it: I saw even her modesty, and, above all, her truth and the womanly knowledge of what a wife should be to her husband. I also saw that her father's will was her law; that her father's will had influenced her ever; and that when I first proffered my request of him for his daughter in marriage she took such a request as his will: had he said No, her answer would have been likewise: as it was Yes, she had acquiesced. But the pain of it! the pain of it! I never once, from the minute the words clung to my mind like burning iron to flesh, questioned as to how I must reply to the letter: the reply shaped itself while I read her words. Could I take to myself a wife who cared little for me? I cared too much for Barbara to have such a wife.