on myself
as one most unprosperous, most sorrowful-hearted.

What in Heaven's name ailed me? What did I lack? My jealousy of Roger,
such a living, stinging, biting thing _then_; how dead it is now!

Barbara always said I was wrong; always!

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 o