As his eyes, in the patient mournfulness of their reproachful appeal, answer again in memory the shrewish violence of my accusation on the night of the ball--the last embers of my jealousy die. He does not love me as he did; of that I am still persuaded. There is now, perhaps, there always will be, a film, a shade between us. By my peevish tears, by my mean and sidelong reproaches, by my sulky looks, I have necessarily diminished, if not quite squandered the stock of hearty, wholesome, honest love that on that April day he so diffidently laid at my feet. I have already marred and blighted a year and three-quarters of his life. I recollect how much older than me he is, how much time I have already wasted; a pang of remorse, sharp as my knife, runs through my heart; a great and mighty yearning to go back to him at once, to begin over again _at once, this very minute_, to begin over again--overflows and floods my whole being. Late in the day as it is--doubly unseemly and ungracious as the confession will seem now--I will tell him of that lie with which I first sullied the cleanness of our union. With my face hidden on his broad breast, so that I may not see his eyes, I will tell him--yes, I will tell him. "I will arise, and go to him, and say, 'I have sinned against Heaven and before thee.'" So I go. I am nearing Tempest: as I reach the church-yard gate, I stop the carriage, and get out. Barbara was always the one that, after any absence from home, I used first to run in search of. I will go and seek her now. It is drawing toward dusk as I pass, in my long black gown, up the church-path, between the still and low-lying dead, to the quiet spot where, with the tree-boughs waving over her, with the ivy hanging the loose luxuriance of its garlands on the church-yard wall above her head, our Barbara is taking her rest. As I near the grave, I see that I am not its only visitor. Some one, a man, is already there, leaning pensively on the railings that surround it, with his eyes fixed on the dark and winterly earth, and on the newly-planted, flagging flowers. It is Roger. As he hears my approaching steps, the swish of my draperies, he turns; and, by the serene and lifted gravity of his eyes, I see that he has been away in heaven with Barbara. He does not speak as I come near; only he opens his arms joyfully, and yet a little diffidently, too, and I fly to then. "Roger!" I cry, passionately, with a greedy yearning for human love here--at this very spot, where so much of the love of my life lies in death's austere silence at my feet--"love me a little--_ever so little_! I know I am not very lovable, but you once liked me, did not you?--not nearly so much as I thought, I know, but still _a little_!" "_A little!_"