How little I thought that those stains and that splash would ever speak to me with voices of such pathos! I have asked to be allowed to sleep in Barbara's and my old room. I am there now. I have thrown myself on Barbara's little white bed, and am clasping her pillow in my empty arms. Then, with blurred sight and swimming eyes, I look round at all our little childish knick-knacks. There is the white crockery lamb that she gave me the day I was six years old! Poor little trumpery lamb! I snatch it up, and deluge its crinkly back, and its little pink nose, with my scalding tears. At night I cannot sleep. I have pulled aside the curtains, that through the windows my eyes may see the high stars, beyond which she has gone. Through the pane they make a faint and ghostly glimmer on the empty bed. I sit up in the dead middle of the night, when the darkness and so-called silence are surging and singing round me, while the whole room feels full of spirit presences. _I alone!_ I am accompanied by a host--a bodiless host. I stretch out my arms before me, and cry out: "Barbara! Barbara! If you are here, make some sign! I _command_ you, touch me, speak to me! I shall not be afraid!--dead or alive, can I be afraid of _you_?--give me some sign to let me know where you are--whether it is worth while trying to be good to get to you! I _adjure_ you, give me some sign!" The tears are raining down my cheeks, as I eagerly await some answer. Perhaps it will come in the cold, _cold_ air, by which some have known of the presence of their dead; but in vain. The darkness and the silence surge round me. Still, still I feel the spirit-presences; but Barbara is dumb. "You have been away such a short time!" I cry, piteously. "You cannot have gone far! Barbara! Barbara! I _must_ get to you! If _I_ had died, and _you_ had lived, a hundred thousand devils should not have kept me from you. I should have broken through them all and reached you. Ah! cruel Barbara! you do not _want_ to come to me!" I stop, suffocated with tears; and through the pane the high stars still shine, and Barbara is dumb! CHAPTER LI. "The last touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by day and by night. Their last step on the stairs, at the door, still throbs through me, if ever so light. Their last gift which they left to my childhood, far off in the long-ago years, Is now turned from a toy to a relic, and seen through the crystals of tears. 'Dig the snow,' she said, 'For my church-yard bed; Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze, If one only of these, my beloveds, shall love with heart-warm tears, As I have loved these.'"