above all generations, is laboring--and, as not a few think, _successfully_--to discrown. To her, his kingship is as unquestioned as when heretics and paynims burnt to prove it. Often, since then, in those vain longings that come to each of us, I suppose, I tried in after-days--sometimes I try now, to stretch my arms out wide-backward toward the past--to speak the words that would have been as easily spoken then as any other--that no earthly power can ever make spoken words now, of sympathy and appreciation to Barbara. I did say loving things, but they seem to me now to have been but scant and shabby. Why did not I say a great many more? Oh, all of you who live with those that are dearer to you than they seem, tell them every day how much you love them! at the risk of _wearying_ them, tell them, I pray you: it will save you, perhaps, many after-pangs. I think that, at this time, there are in me _two_ Nancys--Barbara's Nancy, and Roger's Nancy; the one so vexed, thwarted, and humiliated in spirit, that she feels as if she never could laugh quite heartily again; the other, so utterly and triumphantly glad, that any future tears or trials seem to her in the highest degree improbable. And Barbara herself is on the side of this latter. From her hopeful speech and her smiles, you would think that some good news had come to her--that she was on the eve of some long-looked-for, yet hardly-hoped prosperity. Not that she is unnaturally or hysterically lively--an error into which many, making such an effort and struggle for self-conquest, would fall. Barbara's mirth was never noisy, as mine and the boys' so often was. Perhaps--nay, I have often thought since, _certainly_--she weeps as she prays, in secret; but God is the only One who knows of her tears, as of her prayers. She has always been one to go halves in her pleasures, but of her sorrows she will give never a morsel to any one. Her very quietness under her trouble--her silence under it--her equanimity--mislead me. It is the impulse of any hurt thing to cry out. I, myself, have always done it. Half unconsciously, I am led by this reasoning to think that Barbara's wound cannot be very deep, else would she shrink and writhe beneath it. So I talk to her all day, with merciless length, about Roger. I go through all the old queries. I again critically examine my face, and arrive--not only at the former conclusion, that one side is worse-looking than the other, but also that it looks ten years older. I have my flax hair built in many strange and differing fashions, and again _un_built: piled high, to give me height; twisted low, in a vain endeavor to liken me to the Greeks; curled, plaited, frizzed, and again unfrizzed. I institute a searching and critical examination of my wardrobe, rejecting this and that; holding one color against my cheek, to see whether my pallor will be able to bear it; turning away from another with a grimace of self-disgust.