"_Kill_ me!" she says, with a little sorrowful smile of derision; "no, no! I am not so easily killed." "Are you _sure_?" persist I, with a passionate eagerness, still reading her tear-stained face, "that it will not take the taste out of every thing?--that it will not make you hate all your life?--it would me." "_Quite_ sure!--certain!" she says, looking back at me with a steady meekness, though her blue eyes brim over; "because God has taken from me _one_ thing--one that I never had any right to expect--should I do well, do you think, to quarrel with all that He has left me?" I cannot answer; her godly patience is too high a thing for me. "Even if my life _were_ spoilt," she goes on, after a moment or two, her voice gaining firmness, and her face a pale serenity, "even if it were--but it is _not_--indeed it is not. In a very little while it will seem to me as good and pleasant and full as ever; but even if it _were_" (looking at me with a lovely confidence in her eyes), "it would be no such very great matter--_this_ life is not every thing!" "Is not it?" say I, with a doubting shiver. "Who can tell you that? who knows?" "_No one_ has been to blame," she continues, with a gentle persistence. "I should like you to see that! There has been only a--a--_mistake_"--(her voice failing a little again), "a mistake that has been corrected in time, and for which no one--_no one_, Nancy, is the worse!" CHAPTER XXXIII. So this is the way in which Barbara's hope dies! Our hopes have as many ways of dying as our bodies. Sometimes they pine and fall into a slow consumption, we nursing, cockering, and physicking them to the last. Sometimes they fall down dead suddenly, as one that in full health, with his bones full of marrow, and his eyes full of light, drops wordless into the next world unaware. This last has been Barbara's case. When she thought it healthiest, and most vigorous in its stalwart life, then the death-mark was on it. To most of us, O friends, troubles are as great stones cast unexpectedly on a smooth road; over which, in a dark night, we trip, and grumblingly stumble, cursing, and angrily bruising our limbs. To a few of us, they are ladders, by which we climb to God; hills, that lift us nearer heaven--that heaven, which, however certainly--with whatever mathematical precision--it has been demonstrated to us that it exists not here, nor there, nor yet anywhere, we still dimly, with yearning tears and high longings, grasp at. Barbara has always looked heavenward. In all her mirth, God has mixed. Now, therefore, in this grief that He has sent her--this ignoble grief, that yet cuts the none less deeply for being ignoble, and excluding the solace of human sympathy, she but thrusts her hand with a fuller confidence in his, and fixes her sweet eyes with a more reverent surety on the one prime consoler of humankind, who, from his Cross, has looked royally down the toiling centuries--the king, whom this generation,