It appears to me that, in this very life of the present, each little delinquency is so heavily paid for--so exorbitantly overpaid, indeed. Look, for instance, at my own case. I told a lie--a lie more of the letter than the spirit--and since then I have spent six months of my flourishing youth absolutely devoid of pleasure, and largely penetrated with pain. I have stood just outside my paradise, peeping under and over the flaming sword of the angel that guards it. I have been near enough to smell the flowers--to see the downy, perfumed fruits--to hear the song of the angels as they go up and down within its paths; but I have been outside. Now I have told another lie, and I suppose--nay, what better can I hope?--that I shall live in the same state of weary, disproportioned retribution to the end of the chapter. These are the thoughts, interspersed and diversified with loud sighs, that are employing my mind one ripe and misty morning a few days later than the incidents last detailed. Barbara is to arrive to-day. She is coming to pay us a visit--coming, like the lady mentioned by Tennyson, in "In Memoriam"--not, indeed, "to bring her babe," but to "make her boast." And how, pray, am I to listen with complacent congratulation to this boast? For the first time in my life I dread the coming of Barbara. How am I, whose acting, on the few occasions when I have attempted it, has been of the most improbably wooden description--how am I, I say, to counterfeit the extravagant joy, the lively sympathy, that Barbara will expect--and naturally expect--from me? I get up and look at myself in the glass. Assuredly I shall have to take some severe measures with my countenance before it falls under my sister's gaze. Small sympathy and smaller joy is there in it now--it wears only a lantern-jawed, lack-lustre despondency. I practise a galvanized smile, and say out loud, as if in dialogue with some interlocutor: "Yes, _delightful_!--I am _so_ pleased!" but there is more mirth in the enforced grin of an unfleshed skull than in mine. That will never take in Barbara. I try again--once, twice--each time with less prosperity than the last. Then I give it up. I must trust to Providence. As the time for her coming draws nigh, I fall to thinking of the different occasions since my marriage, on which I have watched for expected comings from this window--have searched that bend in the drive with impatient eyes--and of the disappointment to which, on the two occasions that rise most prominently before my mind's eye, I became a prey. Well, I am to be subject to no disappointment--if it _would_ be a disappointment--to-day. Almost before I expect her--almost before she is due--she is here in the room with me, and we are looking at one another. I, indeed, am staring at her with a black and stupid surprise. "Good Heavens!" say I, bluntly; "what _have_ you been doing to yourself? _how_ happy you look!"