t be _quite_
Barbara--not the Barbara that knitted socks for the boys, and taught Tou
Tou, and whose slight, fond arms I can--now that I have shut my eyes--so
plainly feel thrown round my shoulders, to console me when I have broken
into easy tears at some silly tiff with the others. Can even the
omnipotent God remember all the unnumbered dead, and restore to them the
shape and features that they once wore, and by which they who loved them
knew them?

The funeral is over now--over two days ago. She lies in Tempest
church-yard, at her own wish. The blinds are drawn up again; the sun
looks in; and life goes on as before.

Already there has grown a sacredness about the name of Barbara--the name
that used to echo through the house oftener than any other, as one and
another called for her. Now, it is less lightly named than the names of
us live ones.

I shall always _wince_ when I hear it. Thank God! it is not a common
name. After a while, I know that she will become a sealed subject, never
named; but as yet--while my wound is in its first awful rawness, I must
speak of her to some one.

I am talking of her to Roger now; Roger is very good to me--very! I do
not seem to care much about him, nor about anybody for the matter of
that, but he is very good.

"You liked her," I say, in a perfectly collected, tearless voice, "did
not you? You were very kind and forbearing to them all, always--I am
very grateful to you for it--but you liked _her_ of your own accord--you
would have liked her, even if she had not been one of us, would not
you?"

I seem greedy to hear that she was dear to everybody.

"I was very fond of her," he answers, in a choked voice.

"And you are _sure_ that she is happy now?" say I, with the same keen
agony of anxiety with which I have put the question twenty times
before--"well off--better than she was here--you do not say so to
comfort me, I suppose; you would say it even if I were talking--not of
her--but of some one like her that I did not care about?"

He turns to me, and clasps my dry, hot hands.

"Child!" he says, looking at me with great tears standing in his gray
eyes--"I would stake all my hopes of seeing His face myself, that she
has gone to God!"

I look at him with a sort of wistful envy. How is it that he and Barbara
have attained such a certainty of faith? He can _know_ no more than I
do. After a pause--

"I think," say I, "that I should like to go home for a bit, if you do
not min