Much more talk ensued. The girls came to the conclusion that, for the present, they must do nothing that might let the secret out of their keeping. They must wait and watch: when the right thing grew plain, they would do it! CHAPTER XXX. _BARBARA THINKS_. Barbara rode home with strange things in her mind. Here was a romance brought to her very door! She was nowise hungry after romance, being of the essence of romance her own lovely self, in the simplicity which carried her direct to the heart of things. She was life in such relation to life, that her very existence was natural romance. How should there be any romance to equal that of pure being, of existence regarded and encountered face to face, of the voyage forth from the heart of life, and the toilsome journey, peril-beset, back to the home of that same heart of hearts! Here was one wrapt in a strange cloud: why should she not pass through the cloud, and join her fellow-traveller within? Naturally then, from this time, the thoughts of Barbara rested not a little upon the person and undeveloped history of the man with whose being she was before linked by a greater indebtedness than any but herself could understand. Any enlargement of relation to the unseen world--the world, I mean, of thought and reality, region of recognizable relation, or force--is an immeasurably more precious gift than any costliest thing that a mortal may call his own until death, but must then pass on to another; and Richard had thrown open to Barbara the wealthiest regions of the literature of her race! She, on her part, had so much influenced him, that he had at least become far less overbearing in the presentment of his unbelief. For Barbara's idea, call it, if you will, her imagination of a God, was one with which none of those things for the hate's sake of which he had become the champion of a negation, held fellowship; and he carried himself toward it with so much courtesy that she had begun to hope he was slowly following her out of the desert places, where, little as she yet knew about God, she felt life impossible. The strongest bonds were thus in process of binding them; and Barbara's feeling toward Richard might very naturally develop into one or other of the million forms to which we give the common name of love.