asked me to send you those books. To think that a day
should have come when I could forget to do something you had asked
me! I have seen to it, with much penitence. Forgive me!

Your Emilia is a miserable specimen; she despises herself very much.
I go up and down all day like something that has lost its balance,
neither have I any. One hour I am absolutely happy; the next I am
biting the dust. One day I say to myself, I will never walk or talk
or read or sit alone with him again,--and perhaps for that one day I
keep my word. But then, the next, I do all I meant not to do, I pine
for it till I bring it about. And when I have sat beside him a
little while, doing my lessons, the Greek loses its hold of my poor
brain, my head swims, I make a blunder; then he laughs and says he
cannot understand how such an apparently clever woman can have such
a sieve for a brain. I laugh, and tell him he's unmannerly. Then we
both laugh, and I am well until I am ill again.

It is only since I knew Gabriel that I know how to laugh. I don't
mean to say that I never laughed before. Do you remember how we
sometimes screamed up in my room at Florence? I remember, too, as a
child, going into wild fits of laughter, and mamma and I having to
wipe each other's eyes. But these days were few and far between. I
have learned to laugh with my years. Very fine wit is lost upon me,
and I have certainly no native humour of my own; but I do know how
to laugh about nothing at all, how to make merry over the thorns of
life! Laughter was not meant for the joyful; it was made for us, the
sombre of soul, to save our heart-strings here and there; like the
song of a lark in the sky, to bid us lift our eyes from the dust of
the road.

Sometimes, when I have been laughing very much, and then remember my
pain, I see the vision of a child that dances on a grave-mound in
the sun.

Sweet, I'll go on to-morrow.

January 20th.

I distinguished myself to-day! It came on to pour while I was at the
Cottage, and, in spite of a certain caution that has crept into my
actions of late, I stayed there the whole afternoon.

Jane was actually making herself a new dress, so I offered to help
her, and we sewed by lamplight at the kitchen table, it being a very
dark afternoon. Gabriel joined us after a while; he thought we
looked so cosy that he brought his books and sat at the table too,
just opposite me.

You have never